TEACHING RECTANGLES HOW TO FIND AN AREA
I didn’t write a close-out post. I feel like NYC public schools already closed back in March, back when I thought our country might have a chance to see kids again the last two weeks of June.
Everyone who’s read this blog for some time knows that hope is my passenger, realism my backseat driver. As Rebecca Solnit says:
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, a alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what is may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
As I sat there on the Friday before we shut down, hope set in. Hope came in multiple forms. I hoped, between our governor and mayor’s petty jousts, they would both listen to educators’ concerns and parents’ necessities. I looked at the dwindling number of students per class, hoping they would find rest wherever they lived. Underneath that, I hoped that America would recognize how the personal is political, and all the ways we neglected thinking of our communities allowed for the eventual and CONTINUE READING: Teaching Rectangles How To Find An Area | The Jose Vilson
