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Why Read, Anyway? The Power of the Word

Posted by :James Howden On : March 26, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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Serendipity lives. Despite my love for the contents of my own little basement-bound library, I still find myself looking for (and believing in) the Right Book at the Right Time. I’m an accidentalist by literary nature: am I dialled in to the there are no accidents synchronicity of the spiritually wired world? Or grasping at the bookish straws of superstition? Take your pick.

But I have learned that I don’t need to pack much homefront reading material when I travel, because text will find me. Sure, too often it’s just that day’s sports or entertainment in another town’s newspaper, but it’s surprising how often I whimsically come across a text that I’d been looking for, or one that filled a need I didn’t know I had. Today’s example comes from an aimless stroll through my local library. Living in the big city now – and Ottawa is hugely sophisticated compared to all my tiny towns – libraries are a whole new deal for me. They’re better than the one at home. There’s great stuff everywhere. On my way to the periodicals, I was stopped by the fairly plain cover of a book featured on the end of a shelf. Why Read? was its title, and why not? was my magnetized reply.

It’s another book on the importance of reading, of course, and though I figured it would be overly familiar, the Ol’ Readin’ ‘n’ Writin’ Coach couldn’t pass it by. Published in 2004, its author, Mark Edmundson, is an American professor of literature. I was attracted by his choice of title, yes, and then by the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote with which he opens the book: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.” [my emphasis] In the face of a literary establishment that favours detachment, irony and deconstruction (and which he skewers with bitter eloquence), Edmundson takes an unabashedly antique position. “Reading woke me up,” he says, and made him a teacher. His beautifully written opening essay, “Literary Life”, lays out his thesis:

[L]iterature…is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes,…our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth. However much society at large despises imaginative writing, however much those supposedly committed to preserve and spread literary art may demean it, the fact remains that in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.

You will see that Professor Edmundson is not one for the microscope, not an advocate for poetic alienation and identity politics.

“Books…are for nothing but to inspire.” Edmundson starts with Emerson, and builds from there a passionate and sweetly worded argument that is addressed firstly to those (his colleagues) who teach literature, and secondly to students who “read over the shoulders of your teachers”. He laments the loss of a truly liberal education in America: “Universities have become sites not for human transformation, but for training and for entertaining….[S]tudents use the humanities…to prepare for lucrative careers…[to] acquire marketable skills…[or as] sources of easy pleasure.” Edmundson, meanwhile, wants them to be MOVED, “to become other than they are”.

He insists on personal transformation as the basis of a true education. “’You must change your way of life,’ says Rilke’s sculpture of Apollo to the beholder. So says every major work of intellect and imagination, but in the university now – as in the culture at large – almost no one hears.” Mark Edmundson is gloomy about the way that his beloved literature has been used, torn asunder, isolated or completely abandoned in contemporary life, but goes on to suggest the ways it might be rehabilitated, and therefore help to rehabilitate us. He has something of the tone of the prophetic voice crying in the wilderness, and this emotional appeal combined with his reasoned and gorgeous prose lends it real credibility.

I was reminded of another citation of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, this in the Canadian literary journal Brick. Included in the publishing data at the front of each issue is this statement of literary philosophy: “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.” Professor Edmundson would surely approve my added emphasis, and he echoes this frankly ecstatic tone throughout this excellent book. Why Read? is a profound meditation and a call to ivory tower action. I wonder how many are listening.

J-MAC and the Miracle: Everything Sport Should Be

Posted by :James Howden On : March 6, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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The story of Jason McElwain is going to be a legendary one in American sport. (Legends don’t take as long to build as they used to, nor do they have the same staying power as they once did. So call it a fast-food legend if you must, but don’t miss the story.) The video of the CBS News piece is making the Internet rounds, cheek by jowl with a million profoundly unworthy things. But the “Miracle at Greece Athena High” (miracles may not be what they used to be, either) will receive and deserve a gazillion downloads, because so much of the best of sport is there. So much of the best in life is there.

It happened in February. An upstate New York high school was playing its final home basketball game of the season, a traditional night to honour the graduating players. This is school sport taken seriously and done well. As someone who coached high school hoops for nearly 20 years, the signs are clear in the video, which incorporates large chunks of locally shot game film. It’s a gorgeous gymnasium, full of many hundreds of enthusiastic and knowledgeable fans. Shots of practice make it clear that this is a well-organized, sweat-soaked, excellence-in-education approach to sport. And in the middle of that practice is a slender blonde boy, the team’s manager but obviously much more. His name is Jason.

If you don’t yet know Jason’s story, and especially if you do, here is the condensed version. Autistic boy loves basketball. Coach makes him varsity manager – water, rebounding for practice drills – but doesn’t count on fierce enthusiasm and dedication. Gives Jason a uniform for final home game, hopes to get him in for a minute or two. Gets him nearly four minutes, his team being comfortably ahead. Teammates pass to Jason. He misses badly. And again. And then he hits one, a long three-point heave, and the home team and its fans are wild with excitement. Jason scored! And then he hits FIVE MORE THREES, finishing with 20 points and a perch on the shoulders of a surging hometown crowd that has rushed the floor. Within days, it is a national event, a hopeful, deeply human story and an American dream come true.

And, like every media-celebrated good thing, there are some worrisome elements. Jason McElwain not only had his shining moment on the hometown stage after working in the wings, but now he’s a national, even an international flavour of the week. Apparently a movie deal is in the works. (Shudder.) Beyond the genuine joy that so many feel in his startling accomplishment, there is a real smell of kitsch and opportunism, not only in the media’s ravenous (and brief) glare but also in the indirect aren’t we altogether wonderful? glow of public self-congratulation. There were, no doubt, students among the cheering throng who had previously shunned or harassed this odd boy in school hallways. Too, there is a tendency to dredge up the old “anything is possible in America” mantra and ignore how difficult it is for special-needs kids and their families. It’s worth remembering that this nearly incredible incident does not change how difficult it is for the mentally ill, for the excluded of all kinds, for the poor in a country where it is notoriously painful for those who “don’t make the team” in one respect or another.

That’s enough of the dark side. (But don’t forget it’s there.) I didn’t think about any of those things when I first saw the video, or the fourth time. I got tight in the throat. I watered my cheeks. Understand: I am a True Believer in the beauty and beneficence of sport, and I don’t expect to ever mature enough that I would fail to be moved by athletics at its purest and best. What’s more, I’ve spent thousands of hours on high school courts (almost) like that one. I live there still. So when I saw Jason lighting up his home gym, I enjoyed the Underdog Makes Good theme, like most other people, but there was much more.

That evening encapsulated everything I always wanted high school basketball to be. There was the coach, Jim Johnson, obviously a skilled and dedicated one but also somebody who saw in his sport an unusual chance to do some good for the kind of boy that would never make one of his teams. I don’t know how long Jason has been Johnson’s manager, but his ability to deliver the pre-practice pep talk suggests that he’s been observing Coach Johnson carefully. For an autistic kid to have a coach’s trust and the players’ ears speaks to a long relationship. However many times Jason had been picked on in school, my guess is that this had come to an end once he was adopted by Johnson and the school’s alpha-male athletes. And let’s not forget what else the “miracle”, as told in four minutes, underplays: the old jock adage that “the harder I work, the luckier I get!” Jason had to have used his time in the gym to shoot thousands of shots, whenever his duties allowed him the chance.

There was also a school community that was well aware of Jason’s contributions, and loved him for them before he ever hit the floor that night. In the video, when Coach Johnson signals for his erstwhile manager to enter the game, the crowd is already roaring and his teammates are clapping as he heads for the scorer’s table. The starting players, on the bench by now, rise as one for Jason’s first (missed) shot, and they leap for genuine joy when he hits that first one. Each successive bomb finds these talented young men jumping and cheering deliriously for their “little buddy”, their good-luck charm, their teammate. The Trojan fans’ united ecstasy over “J-MAC” and his miracle run had been preceded by his having earned their respect and admiration; some had come to the game with Jason’s face on a mini-poster, sort of a personalized table tennis paddle. Finally, few have remarked on the opponent on that magic night. I was sure on first seeing the video, and had it confirmed in a later interview given by Mr. Johnson, that he had spoken to the other coach about the possibility of Jason playing. Jason’s big night could not have happened the way it did without the respectful stance of the opponents – not that they “let” him score (6 for 7 from three-point land is hard for a good player shooting in an empty gym), but that they honoured his opportunity to play. That’s great coaching on both sides of the centre stripe.

Who knows what awaited Greece-Athena High School in its playoff run? You’d have to be living there to care much. But for me, the pinnacle of sport had already been reached in the joyful friendship, the respectful regard, and the widespread spirit of hopefulness and wonder that are still rippling outward from one local high school.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SKILLS, STUPID: Hockey, Learning & Heart

Posted by :James Howden On : February 16, 2006
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(This article was written in January 2003, just after the Canadian Junior Hockey Team had lost the gold medal in the World Championships of that year. They lost to the Russians, which is no shame, but...)

Silver is silver, and we can still bask nationally in the sun of Salt Lake, but there was something in that oh-so-close loss to the Russian juniors that was irritating.  Our man Fleury was superb in goal and probably won his M.V.P. award on the strength of that last game, and the Canadian boys were plucky but overmatched.  It really wasn’t that close.  The thing that got to me, though, was the tearful commentary of one of the lads, trying to figure out what had happened to him, his mates, his nation.  “We gave everything we had, we played with lots of heart…”  Ugh.  Heart.  When will we realize that’s not enough?

Of course they played with heart.  That’s a given, isn’t it?  Yes, and our Canadian men fought with brilliant heart at Dieppe, too, but we remember equally the criminal lack of preparation with which they launched themselves against a mighty foe.  Please don’t mistake me, I don’t equate the two enterprises; I just wonder, with the 30th anniversary of the Summit Series having just passed, when Canadian hockey men will finally admit that we can learn about Our Game from people who don’t come from Kingston, Ontario?  Captain Scottie Upshall did (“that’s a great team over there, they must be doing some things right in Russia”), and it’s astonishing, from where I sit, that we still teach our young players that heart is pre-eminent.

The situation in other sports is instructive.  Holger Osieck, a German, was brought in to coach our national men’s soccer side.  He deplored the Canadian style of play, which involved a lot of long hopeful kicks and furious running—can you say “dump and chase”?—and immediately required ball-control strategies.  Not only that, he had asked for and been granted the authority to dictate his methods to the feeder elements of the national program; there is a unity of purpose here that is strikingly absent in Canadian hockey.

Last summer’s World Championships of basketball provide an example that Canadian hockey-lovers should recognize.  The Americans entered their “Dream Team” in Barcelona in 1992, their college all-star teams having lost in ’72 (“we wuz robbed!”) and ’88 (“oh-oh, they’re catchin’ up!”).  The youngsters were vulnerable, but when they sent Michael, Larry, and Magic, it was no contest.  Until, ten years later, it was.  The national hand-wringing after NBA players fell so clumsily last summer was eerily familiar to Canadians.  ESPN commentator Jay Bilas, a former Duke University star, was most eloquent.  Even when the Americans still had their chance to win (after losing to Argentina in pool play), Bilas was sounding the alarm.  We can’t just throw all-star teams together.  We need to prepare.  Our kids aren’t learning skills.  They play too much and practise too little.  The Europeans have better fundamentals…Sound familiar?  Their first wake-up call came in 1972, when the Soviets won Olympic gold in Munich, but their true dominance of basketball remained unquestioned.  Last summer, for American hoops, was a closer analogy to the periodic bouts of Canadian dismay that began in ’72.  Our experience in self-examination allows this prediction.  American basketball chauvinists will prevail.  They’ll learn some small technical lessons from Indianapolis, but dismiss it as an aberration.  Shrill voices will occasionally demand a fundamental rethinking of the way “our game” is approached.  They will be ignored.  And the rest of the world will continue to improve…

The Americans could learn a lot from our experience as the erstwhile “first nation” of hockey (or England’s in soccer, for that matter, which finally, desperately, hired Sven Goran Eriksson as its first foreign national coach; imagine that happening in USA Basketball, or Hockey Canada!).  But they won’t.  We haven’t learned.  Our pride in the Canadian Way to Play is quaint, but it is increasingly relegating our top athletes to “role player” status, while the NHL imports its dazzle.  What’s worse is that we’ve accepted this so completely, even romanticizing it as the demonstration of genuine passion, true “heart”, and the virtues of “old-time hockey”.  Amazingly, even the careers of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux have not removed a rather defensive attitude of suspicion toward players, Canadian or otherwise, who are distinguished by their skill and cleverness.  Gretzky seems poised to act as the national face of hockey, and his insistence on a game of puck movement and speed for our Olympic teams bears great promise.  Are Canadian youngsters, and especially coaches, more likely to hear that quadrennial voice, or Coach’s Corner on Saturday evenings?

Hint—yesterday’s National Post had this headline on its front page:  “Oh, stop crying already! Canada still rules hockey”.  Accompanying stats in which Canada had a record superior to the Russians (leading NHL scorers, Olympic wins, world junior wins) was an article peppered with the observations of, you guessed it, Don Cherry.  We were missing players that their NHL clubs wouldn’t release, and so on.  For all the truth contained in the article, it’s a reminder of how defensive Canadian hockey types can get, a sort of emotional left-wing lock.  This shouldn’t be a dark period of national self-examination; Lord knows we have more serious matters to debate. But let’s hope that we teach our kids to better know and love the wizardry and speed of the game.  The heart will follow.

McCourt: “I Was TEACHING, That’s What Took So Long!”

Posted by :James Howden On : December 21, 2005
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This review appeared in the Books section of “Canada’s National Newspaper”, the Globe and Mail, on December 24, 2005. Thanks, Martin.

“Listen. Are you listening?…Every moment of your life, you’re writing… A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head, decisions galore….The cool character, the charmer, doesn’t have to prepare much of a script. The rest of us are writing…”

For decades, it occurred mainly in the margins of student papers and in classroom dialogues, but now we all know what Frank McCourt was writing. Angela’s Ashes made him, as he derisively puts it, “the mick of the moment”, and this overnight success required only a miserable Irish childhood, then 50 years to come to terms with it. Those ensuing adult decades in the United States (“Isn’t this a great country altogether?”) were recounted in ‘Tis, but “after it was published I had the nagging feeling I’d given teaching short shrift”.

Now 75 years old, McCourt has redeemed that failing with Teacher Man, a superbly digressive stroll down the aisles of his teaching career in New York City. The mix of lamentation, wit and dogged observation will be familiar and welcome to those who enjoyed his earlier memoirs. This is a smaller canvas, but a richly remembered one.

To feel he had neglected teaching must have been a bitter irony for McCourt. In a pointed and often sarcastic prologue, he spins the ultimate fairy tale: teachers bathed in support and admiration by their communities, teachers lovingly heeded by government, teachers on television (“Imagine!”). He fantasizes about hollow-lived Hollywood actresses tearfully offering to trade their empty fame for the life of a teacher. HA!

In the same introduction, though, he paints the real picture. He lists the professionals that are admired and tangibly rewarded by North Americans: doctors, politicians and entertainers but “not teachers. Teaching is the downstairs maid of professions.” He compares the anonymity, even the outright humiliation, of his three decades in education with his unexpected status as a best-selling author, “a geriatric novelty with an Irish accent” whose opinions on nearly everything, suddenly, were eagerly sought. McCourt now wants all of us to hear this: Teaching is important. Teaching is hard. Teaching is heartbreaking, especially when it is done well. And teaching is how he learned to understand life well enough to write about it.

As a man who spent years in high school hallways, I loved the vindication of the profession that is so flamingly argued in the prologue.  I was moved to recognition, wry chuckles and the occasional fierce tear by Teacher Man. Chalk-stained wretches will find it a mirror, and not always a flattering one. More importantly, it is a window on the classroom for those who have forgotten what school (and what they) were like, or who ignore schools studiously until it’s time to lay blame for the Social Ill of the Week. Its passionate insights deserve a wide and thoughtful reading.

So how does McCourt show us high school life? No surprise here: he tells stories. The tales of childhood woe and immigrant struggle in his first two books were honed in front of skeptical audiences of teens. In Teacher Man, he occasionally strays from his classroom into accounts of this love affair, that strange roommate or loyal friend. I felt like a student trying to avoid a grammar lesson: Come on, sir, can we get back to those teaching stories? The classroom tales are dramatic, funny and poignant, the best of the book.

“Here they come. And I’m not ready.” McCourt remembers the wait for his first class at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, the same feeling I had every September for 20 years. The first part of the book, “It’s a Long Road to Pedagogy”, tells of his painful apprenticeship, bringing literary appreciation and writing skill to “the future mechanics and craftsmen of America”. “Yo, teacher man!” calls out Joey the Mouth, moments after an eccentric response to a flying baloney sandwich gives McCourt the first small victory of his career. “So, you Scotch or somethin’?” And the stories begin: the ones he tells his students, and the ones they live out with him.

Like all good teachers, he is haunted by his failures. Augie is beaten by his father in front of his classmates. Kevin the Lost Boy ends up utterly lost in Vietnam. Pedagogical truisms on the “posture and placement”, the “identity and image” of the good teacher are useless (or worse) to McCourt. He is accused, by Paulie’s mother at his first Open School conference and by his own relentlessly guilty conscience, of being “a fraud, a goddam fraud. Stories, stories, stories!”

Yet from baloney sandwich intuition to an epiphany on the literary value of forged excuse notes, McCourt is persistent and often inspired in opposing conventionality. He begins to turn the corner on his career. He feels, though, like “A Donkey on a Thistle” as this second part of Teacher Man tells of fitful ambitions and insecurities that keep him stumbling through various outposts of academe.

13 years into his career, seeing himself as “a failed everything…adrift in the American dream”, McCourt begins “Coming Alive in Room 205”, the title of the book’s final section. His only daughter Maggie has just been born, and he finds himself at Stuyvesant High School, “the jewel in the crown of the New York educational system”. Suddenly he is teaching ambitious and talented (if complacent) students in a school that values his unorthodox approach. “I began to feel at home in the world,” McCourt writes. His Creative Writing classroom overflows. “Why don’t they just let him teach in Yankee Stadium?”a colleague wonders.

We read of musical recitations from recipe books. We learn why “Little Bo Peep” might be McCourt’s favourite poem. We listen to him interrogating students about the previous night’s dinner, with startling results. We meet Jonathan the eternal cynic, Serena the gang leader with a heart of gold, and Bob, the Jewish Future Farmer of America. And in a way that we haven’t quite done before, we meet Frank McCourt: “wandering late bloomer, floundering old fart discovering in my forties [and fifties] what my students knew in their teens.”

His internal dialogues are biting, and his comments on education caustic and informed (if slightly repetitive). But his superb ear for the classroom experience is the centre of Teacher Man. We owe a debt to the unnamed student who called out, as the teacher walked away from the last class of his career, “Hey, Mr. McCourt, you should write a book!” I’m certainly grateful for his third one.

On Raising Loving Children

Posted by :James Howden On : November 13, 2005
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You may never have heard of APAPSO, but this small and dynamic community did another fine thing for all of us who are raising children, running busy homes and lives, or trying our best to love a partner. L’Association des parents et amis de la pédagogie Steiner à Ottawa (whew!) is the Mighty Mouse of area education, a group of parents who have instituted a pilot program using Steiner-Waldorf principles in a French-language public school in Vanier. On November 11-12, they held a conference called “Raising Loving Children” featuring Gene Campbell, a Toronto consultant and trainer, who was brought to Ottawa to help parents to make sense of all the things they are trying so hard to do well, to do “right”. It was a wonderful session.

For someone like me, who had to miss the Friday evening session, the Saturday morning start was a bit awkward – for about two minutes. But then Gene helped us do what she does with the youngest children: shut off our minds and go to our bodies. We clapped and snapped our fingers and learned how to get in synch with each other. “The mind has no sense of rhythm,” she later pointed out. “It’s very linear. We need something to interrupt the pattern of a mind-centred materialism. Only the heart, the body, has rhythm…”

And so that’s where we started. In an amazingly short time, as we introduced our children to the group and expressed our dedication to them, we became a community. As we expressed our dearest wishes and feelings, we were united as friends: listening, comparing notes, laughing, even crying together. And that’s when the doors to learning really opened.

Gene has quite a following among Steiner-Waldorf parents, and I could immediately see why. She has huge experience – she taught school for 16 years before she ever ran across the writings of Rudolf Steiner – deep knowledge and eloquent speech. She knows the principles and she has put them into action for years and years. Clearly, plainly, simply, she helped us to learn these things:

* Too many choices aren’t good for the little ones—it makes them too individualistic, and it’s too early for that.
* We need to help them get out, not only out of the house but also out of themselves; nature and imagination are essential to this.
* “Individualism is not a sustainable route to happiness. They need to feel the ‘we’, that sustaining sense that they are part of a family, a team that is there for life…”
* Playing a recorder is not only musical fun but also a psychological assessment tool!
* The creation of community is something we all instinctively long for and have the power to achieve.
* An orderly home is not impossible to achieve, and there are simple techniques and principles to help us get there.
* The home is a body, with its heart and its lungs (and its excretory function—get rid of that stuff!).
* Sometimes, the obstacles and emotional attachments that we think the kids have are really coming from us.
* “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” (These are Margaret Mead’s words, but Gene gave us the same challenge, the same hope for what we are doing with this program.)

And as much as anything, we learned that we are all in this together, that the little
group at Trillium is filled with caring and loving parents (and grandparents), and that the Waldorf-Steiner program has intelligent principles and practical help for this most important job: educating our children in a loving family setting. Our numbers grew as the day went on, and no doubt those numbers will be even higher the next time Gene Campbell comes to town.

This article was written for a local newspaper, and appeared later in November as well as in the APAPSO newsletter.

Elise Goes to Auschwitz

Posted by :James Howden On : June 22, 2005
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Sometimes on a Saturday night, my little family island is flooded by youth. And no, I’m not talking about Retro Night in my mirror-balled basement – I mean actual young people, teens and twenty-somethings. You might call it clear evidence of local warming. Or you might blame it on Tropical Storm Elise. She blew into my living room last week.

Elise is a university student, a colleague of mine when she’s not doing that, and a WOW (Woman of the World) pretty much all the time. When her college offered her a chance to go to Poland for the Walk of the Living – an international youth gathering to commemorate the Holocaust – she leaped at the chance. And we all jumped at our chance to find out about the Walk she made. And how it affected her idea of Living.

The story was intriguing right from the start. The Canadian Jewish Congress decided, on this 60th anniversary of World War II, that the trip wouldn’t be just for raising the consciousness of Jewish kids, as it had been in the past. This time, they were joined by Christians (hi, Elise!), Muslims and those of no particular faith. Interviewers asked tough pre-selection questions: What’s the most difficult thing you’ve ever gone through? How does tolerance show itself in the way that you live?

That didn’t prepare them for airline security – they were flying El Al, Israel’s state airline. Saying they’re careful is like observing that Michael Jackson is a little unusual. Elise was embarrassed, tired, a bit angry (“Didn’t I already answer that? Another scanner? I have to take off what?”), even when she knew the routine was for her own safety. And that the visibly Middle Eastern students were put through a wringer even tighter than the one squeezing her, fair-haired and blue-eyed as she is. Yes, she thought. This must have been how it was. A little bit like that.

And then it was a trans-Atlantic plane ride, and then it was get-off-and-get-on-the-bus to Auschwitz. The bus to Auschwitz. (Quiz: What do you do if you’re losing the war and your enemy is closing in on your concentration camp full of human skeletons whose only crime was ethnicity or lifestyle? One answer: A forced march with beatings can be effective; 56,000 human skeletons were convinced to stop living in only five days.) Auschwitz is now a museum of memory. Display case after display case of human hair. Shoes. Star of David armbands. On and on, all the artifacts of the long and horribly dead. The Genocide Show.

Elise felt terrible because she didn’t feel worse. No tears yet. Jet lag, exhaustion, and a wicked culture shock, sure, but not the tidal waves of empathy and disgust and sorrow that (she guessed) she was looking for. She wondered if something was wrong with her heart. This was Auschwitz, and she was numb. Perhaps just a little, she later thought, like the Jewish people unloaded from cattle cars at this same Polish camp more than six decades before. The same ones who’d been harassed, then restricted, then rounded up for “resettlement”. Disbelief. Shock. Numbness. They must have felt this, too. A little bit like this.

You’ll be glad to know that Elise’s heart was fine. Through the March of the Living between Auschwitz and Birkenau, where the gas chambers killed over a million Jews and thousands of other political prisoners; through visits to the Jewish ghettoes in Krakow and Warsaw; through the visits to concentration/extermination camps at Plaszow (where those that Mr. Schindler couldn’t protect ended up), and at Belzec and Majdanek (where Elise spent Mother’s Day); and, through wrenching conversations with survivors, with the “hidden children”, and with her fellow students, Elise’s mind and heart were stretched and shattered and consoled and shattered again.

For her, the calm centre of this hurricane of feeling was always Anita. Anita rode the bus with the non-Jewish kids. It turned out that she was one of the “hidden”, a Jewish girl whose family had been herded into a ghetto, who was passed secretly out of that ghetto in a burlap bag just before her parents were murdered. (She was 8 when her father dug his own grave before being shot.) She, like many, was sheltered in a Polish Catholic family and raised as a Christian. (One of the other “hidden children” grew up to be a Catholic priest who found out, many years later, that he was Jewish.) Anita’s story became the understandable, human-scale core of an incomprehensible crime.

And these were the questions that the Canadian kids from all backgrounds asked themselves: How did this get started? (Shunning, blaming; from burning books to burning the people who own them is not so big a step.) Where was humanity when all this was going on? (A better question, surely, than “Where was God?”; we don’t seem to care as much where God is when stock prices are high.) Where does hope come from amidst such industrial-strength inhumanity?

Their answers were powerful, life-changing, and ultimately hopeful. For Elise, the most pressing question was simple: What are we going to do about what we have seen? Her commitment, and that of a tightly-bonded group that had been strangers five days earlier, came from a Hebrew expression – Tikkam Olam – which means “to repair the world”. The experience made them want to take on this repair mission personally. To bear witness. To speak their truth. To move the world, just a little.

And that is why Elise was in my living room, and that is why a whole bunch of kids came to hear her. The world feels a little less ragged after a night like that, though my heart was a bit frayed.