1. Deborah and I have been friends since we met as students over fifty years ago at Whitworth. She wrote a wonderful response to what I wrote about going to Ferris High School to hear Rick Riordan and Annabelle Ho. Her parallel experience, and more involved one, took place six years ago when she joined her grandson in reading the Harry Potter series, books she hadn't been interested in but that she TOOK AN INTEREST in and enjoyed thoroughly.
I told her, in response, that it was really fun to have a friend and companion on Team Take an Interest.
She liked that and my guess is that we'll both continue to explore things in our life that we hadn't been interested in, but decided to pursue, to take an interest in.
2. By the way, about forty years ago I read Adrienne Rich's convocation address at Douglass College. In it, Rich urged the students not to passively receive an education, but to actively claim their educations through questioning assumption and engaging critically with ideas in the face of contradiction. In other words, she urged students to take responsibility for their education and to experience it as a dynamic, participatory project.
I used to read Rich's address to my students and it was in the spirit of Rich's call to action that I encouraged students who told me they weren't interested in readings I assigned to actively take an interest, to see an education as a way not of confirming ways they already saw the world, but to take an interest in ways they didn't and then decide what they thought of different perspectives or things that happened outside their own experience.
I have no idea if this encouragement made a difference.
I do know I had a lot of fun trying to help my students' worlds become a little larger.
3. Mostly I rested today. I needed to recharge after traveling to Pendleton and back last week and then going to highly stimulating events in Spokane on Saturday and Sunday.
We invited Christy over for dinner late this afternoon.
It's a good thing I had rested.
Our dinner conversation was intense.
We talked a lot about all that Christy went through medically this summer and continues to go through now.
I felt the impact of the complexity of Christy's ongoing medical situation strongly this evening.
She's experiencing multiple difficulties, all at the same time.
It's taxing her.
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