Do You Dream and Weep Sometimes About the Way that Things Should Be?

A friend of mine is spending much of the summer rethinking and discerning what is most important and what is possible to make the most of the next season of life. Looking up people who can talk about our lives and who will have our best interest at heart can help us to catch a vision of what our lives can be. So often we feel closed in by our past decisions, kind of like a train on a track or a wagon in the trail ruts. Composer Ken Medema shines a helpful light on this struggle in the lyrics of his song, "A Place for Dreaming," and the title of this post is the first of several excerpts from this song that I will quote.

Is there a place for dreaming in the corner of your mind?

Richard Rohr comments in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, about the danger that as people get older they will fall into “cognitive rigidity and love of their own status and privilege.”  It means we find it harder to consider a change that can make all the difference for us and for others. Too much is at stake and too many constraints close our minds and block our vision.

Is there a place for dreaming...
In a world where dreams are broken, and dreamers hard to find?

I remember a few years ago telling another friend about a situation on my life that I thought would probably never change in the direction I had hoped, even though I had spent almost 15 years trying to influence that change. Then last year a door opened. An opportunity arose for me to share a vision. I’m still shocked and challenged to imagine what it might mean for me and for the communities I am in.

In the almost six years since Everly died, I have found myself circling back to these same questions over and over. Now that I will not have the life that I had expected for so long, what should my life count for in the remaining years?  Today Shaw University recognized me for 25 years of service. I am halfway through the 26th year already now at age 61. I have worked under eight Presidents and at least nine Vice-Presidents for Academic Affairs. In my six years of undergraduate teaching, I had two department chairs. In my 19-1/2 years in the Divinity School I have worked with four Deans.

I’ve seen the good and the not-so-good. I’ve fought for pay raises and felt across-the-board pay cuts. I’ve been “let go” a couple of times, only to be asked to come back a few weeks later. I helped rewrite a faculty handbook to provide support and protection to faculty employees, only to watch a series of new administrators remove all those protections and back away from habits of commitment to long-term, but all untenured, faculty.  I revised the constitution of the Faculty Senate and helped to bring it back into existence, seeing it initially flourish and grow in strength.  Then I watched leaders become frantic in their confrontations until they forced the kinds of conflict that can only end with faculty dismissals, draining away the organization's power and the morale of the community.  I've dealt with dominating administrators as well as empowering leaders.  I've seen Presidents and Vice-Presidents battle to keep faculty and employees on the payroll, and others seemingly callous to laying off people with one day's notice.  These are bits and pieces of working at this plantation.

There are different goods and not-so-goods of working at the Duke plantation down the road.  I've usually preferred the Shaw plantation to the Duke plantation in my evaluation.  I've worked through personal achievement and personal tragedy, and I've found this community to be one that would hold me up when I felt I would fall, and encourage me when I was able to soar.

Do you dream of another country where there is no push and shove?
Where the rich don't rule, and the poor are fed, and the only law is love?
Where a neighbor is a neighbor, and there is trust and loyalty?

One of the questions I have been asked often during my time at Shaw, by students, by colleagues from other schools, and by friends and associates wherever I go (including last year in Hong Kong), is this one:  "Why have you stayed at Shaw for so long?"  Sometimes it comes as, "Why did you decide to teach at Shaw?"  To the latter formulation, I think that many readers can agree that we don't necessarily "decide" where we will get a job.  This job walked up to me when I was trying to find work.

My good friend Jim Kirkley had answered an ad for an ethics professor at Shaw University during the summer after I had finished my dissertation.  He was hired to help design and lead a new and innovative ethics program, and in order to fulfill the university president's ambitious curriculum initiative, he recognized that Shaw would need more faculty trained in ethics.  By God's grace, Jim saw me as a promising candidate, and that fall he urged me to apply immediately.

I had made a prior decision that meant Kirkley's invitation was crucial for my employment future.  Rooted in my undergraduate years, I had accepted the view that men had undue privilege in society.  I had determined that I did not want to be the kind of man or husband who assumed my life and career were inherently more important than any woman's, and particularly that they did not take precedent over the life and career of whomever might become my wife.

So when I finished my PhD during a time when Everly's career was on a rapid rise, we decided I should try to stay put in central North Carolina so that she could continue her career path.  I wrote to every university with a religion department within driving distance of Durham and explained my situation, offering my availability.  I taught at four schools during that first year.  Kirkley's influence helped determine that Shaw would be one of those four.  I had not particularly pursued Shaw.  I was white, living a white life, and barely knew that Shaw existed; nor did I understand much about why it should exist.

The Department Chair at Shaw interviewed me as classes were beginning in January, and I started teaching as an adjunct immediately.  There are far many more stories to tell, but one has to do with my first day in class.  An adult student beginning his undergraduate education asked me a question concerning the syllabus.  "Why do our readings begin with Socrates and focus on European philosophers of ethics?"  I explained that I had been given a set of books and a syllabus to teach from.

He was starting what became a slow and difficult process of awakening me to the breadth and depth of white supremacist culture in education and in my socialization.  He woke me up enough that day that I told him I thought he had a good point.  I promised to do my research and, as I was able, I would bring to class additional readings from African and African American sources that would be relevant to our subject matter.  From that point I started another phase of my education, something that public schools, Baylor, Golden Gate Baptist, and Duke had not taught me.

Do you dream and weep sometimes about the way that things should be?

I'm not going to drag this long story out.  The main point I want to make is that coming to Shaw made me a better person.  By responding to the student in my class that day, I was becoming a better scholar.  By learning what I was learning in black studies sources and among black students and colleagues and as a member of a black church, I was being changed.  Yes, I went through periods of thinking that I had become quite "woke" only to discover all over again just how parochial my thinking, embedded in whiteness, remained.  Ultimately, I came to realize that it would only be when I could know and feel that my brothers and sisters at church and at work and in the classroom were truly my people, not "those" people, but my people, that I would begin to approach the change that must come for me and for the world.

I didn't become black.  I'm not the great white hero, the great white hope, or the bearer of the white man's burden.  But my people are the ones whom God has sent my way, regardless of families of origin or cultures of separation.  It's a theological argument that Willie Jennings has helped so many of us see:  all of us Gentiles, whether European or African, Anglo-Saxon or Zulu, have been invited in Jesus Christ to love and be loved by a God who first of all was not ours.  We are the grafted in, yet fully received as friends and as joint-heirs.

When I was a child, I used to daydream a lot,
But they told me that it would not last.
I wouldn't have time for such a waste of my mind
When my life started moving fast.
Now that I'm grown, I find that life with no dreams
Is a hell that I simply can't bear.
If it's all right I'd like to open my mind
And see if my dreams are still there.

The contextual possibility of learning that sort of theological anthropology and soteriology of invitation into the Jewish specificity of the God of Jesus Christ is why I have stayed at Shaw.  The socialization necessary to try to become that kind of grafted-in person is why I have needed to be at Shaw.  It would be nearly impossible to have done so in very many places.  And for that reason, I hold the deep conviction of the Alma Mater, "Long may thy works be proud, undimmed thy fame."  I've learned to sing the words of James Weldon Johnson, standing between people of darker skin than mine, understanding the truth about us and our ancestors, who in different ways "have come over a way that with tears has been watered....treading a path through the blood of the slaughtered."  It is my colleagues' and my students' history, and it is also my history, although our forebears lived through it in different roles, with different power, and perceiving it from very different worlds.

This is a truth that teaching at Shaw has helped me to see.  Teaching theology, filtered through my heritage and my hermeneutical strivings to make sense of it in black church settings, is something I learned to do by looking into the eyes and faces of my students, listening to their responses, and contemplating what we are together learning.  That is why I have stayed at Shaw.  And staying at Shaw has made me to be who I am.  I can't predict how much longer I will be teaching at Shaw, as my retirement age approaches. Like my friend mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am wondering what the next part of my life should be about.  Maybe a change is coming, or maybe I will remain here in assurance that the path I have been on is the one that will continue to lead me home.  But I can be sure that I will never be away from Shaw wherever I go, for this community has made all the difference in who I am, and they are in me.

Come dreaming with me, dreaming with me, admission is free.

Everly and Stand Your Ground

On the weekend in July near the date that marked three years since Everly died, I began writing this post.  It seemed a good time to return to an idea that started to germinate when I was writing a book review back in February.  Kelly Brown Douglas, in Stand Your Ground:  Black Bodies and the Justice of God, addresses many aspects of whiteness and its theopolitical underpinnings.  As I worked through her excellent presentation, certain parts of her argument drew me into thinking about Everly's work over a quarter century of leadership in transforming how mathematics is taught in public schools.  On that weekend, I started to write about ways that Douglas's theological work and Everly's work in math education are challenging the same kinds of problems.  Now, almost three months later as I celebrate her birthday, I'm going to finish it.

Everly's earliest efforts to influence the way that math is taught began soon after arriving in North Carolina, fresh out of her MS degree in math education from the University of Texas in Austin.  Administrators quickly recognized that as a classroom teacher, she had the potential both through example and leadership to reshape math teaching in a way that more students could have an opportunity to succeed in what is too often thought of as a subject matter for only an elite few.  However, as soon as she was elevated to a position of leadership, she began to meet resistance from the experienced teachers who were already sure that the way to teach math had to be pretty much the same way that they were taught math.  In other words, they, who had emerged as some of the few to succeed in math in a previous generation, seemed satisfied to continue the same pedagogy that rewards only a few.  They were among the few who are able to decipher a code of learning targeted at a narrow portion of the classroom.  It is not surprising to me that this first cadre of organized resistance was made up of an all-white group of teachers.

At the time, Everly and I were not particularly sensitized to the way that math functioned as a marker for racial difference in many education systems.  Even though we were in our mid-twenties, we had not previously lived and worked in places where we met and interacted with African Americans on a regular basis.  In the particular communities of Texas where we grew up, ethnic difference was more directly defined by Mexican American and Anglo American communities.  Having moved for the first time into the South, rather than the Southwest, we were only beginning to get direct experience of the racialized structures of education.  Her teaching both in Chapel Hill and in Durham played a role in reshaping her understanding of the role race plays in math education, especially as it became more clear who had access to higher math classes and who did not.

When Everly got the opportunity to become the coordinator for mathematics education in Durham Public Schools, she intensified her study of the way young people learn math.  That led her into conversations across the country about the gaps in mathematics achievement that show up between minority and majority communities.  She became engaged with leaders who were challenging the idea that some people by their genetic heritage will not be good at math.  She found many of the education leaders in Durham and elsewhere unwilling to have those conversations.  Some bosses told her to stop saying "achievement gap" in public meetings.

Before long she had successfully navigated the federal grants process and received a $5 million plus, four-year grant to revamp math teaching in Durham.  The focus of the program was to change curriculum and the culture of math teaching.  She set out to implement a new curriculum based on study of how math is taught in the countries where students achieve highest on international math tests.  Using a teacher-led, grassroots process, she led the Durham school teachers to select one of the reforming math curricula that the National Science Foundation funding was seeking further research on.

Implementing the curriculum would not be possible within the culture of traditional math teaching.  Everly implemented a district-wide professional development which took every elementary teacher and every middle- and high-school math teacher through about 100 contact hours of training.  The math curriculum schedule for professional development in Durham during those crucial years had over 250 times as many training events as any other teaching field.

The curriculum program was called RAMP:  Realizing Achievement in Mathematics Performance.  Influenced by civil rights leaders Robert Moses and Charles Cobb who through the Algebra Project were advancing the agenda of the Civil Rights Movement into reforming education, she insisted that every child have access to learning higher math.  With Lisa Delpit she championed teaching the same level of skills to all students.  She embraced Carol Malloy's research on the centrality of access to higher math as the barrier for black achievement.  This ruffled feathers in schools where principles and teachers had colluded to steer certain students, often by skin color, away from algebra classes to keep only an elite group of high achievers taking the high-stakes tests by which schools would be compared and graded.  Pushback came from parents who were not used to seeing poor or black children in certain math classes.  When those minority students were making good grades in math, the scuttlebutt assumption was that higher math courses were being "dumbed down."

Kelly Brown Douglas talks about the history and continuing legacy of Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, a version of white supremacy that identifies intelligence and political expertise as the heritage of a specific group of Northern Europeans.  Elsewhere and other times, similar ideas were expressed as Aryan mythology.  This particularly inherent giftedness of a people group justifies their management, supremacy, and control over the destinies of other groups.  Their Manifest Destiny, as Douglas also points out, demands that they extend their power and influence over greater areas, regardless of the wishes of others who may contest their claim to lands and goods.  As Douglas goes on to argue, the Black Lives Matter movement has risen up to challenge the heritage of these aspects of white supremacist ideology which still lead to systemic repression of minorities, even in a world of "racism without racists."

Everly strove to press this agenda against an entrenched belief that there is one good way to teach math that has been used successfully from eternity.  If only 10% of US students are excelling in math, then how can we believe that the way it is being taught is adequate?  Instead, a false belief in the supremacy of a particular genetic pool, children who really may not even need a teacher to help them understand math, has become a justification for not really trying to teach the rest of the students.

Could it be that children of various backgrounds might be trained to solve problems in different ways?  And could those strategies be effective if not immediately shut down by the canonical and only acceptable form of problem-solving being passed on by the elitist tradition of math teaching?  What if the order of courses (algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2) and the concepts and content of those courses were reorganized in a way that coordinates with brain development, cumulative learning processes, and the usefulness of the math processes for collateral science course learning?  Yet many teachers and successful math student parents assume that "since I learned math this way, it must be the right way to learn it."  Accepting the failure of most children seems far from good educational practice.  Trying to cure the problem by doing the same thing harder and with more testing just sounds dumb.  As Bob Moses has insisted, we need to give up the idea of a "math gene" that only a tiny minority has, and start trying to teach in ways that all students can learn.

Everly found the resistance to these changes daunting.  Some schools in Durham did all they could to "opt out" of change.  Some parent groups, unable to accept success of minority students, pressed to have the curriculum changes reversed.  Everly's doctoral research was showing that the change was real.  White students' achievement was going up.  Black students' achievement was going up even faster and the gap was closing significantly.  RAMP was good for all groups.  But social inertia can't always handle the truth.  People make up their minds based on deeply embedded prejudices that keep them from seeing the light that is breaking in.  Some high administrators decided that they would rather stop the complaints than try to understand and defend the progress.  Everly was "reassigned" within the school district to work on a project she philosophically opposed, a clear invitation to find another job.

She was quickly snatched up by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and she carried her research and agenda to address the statewide curriculum.  After several years of successful work for North Carolina, she went to the Texas Education Agency to lead a statewide curriculum reform there in the second largest state school system in the US.  She made many important steps there, including having a curriculum reform adopted by the State Board of Education.  It was her last professional action, and the final vote took place while she was in the hospital struggling through her first chemotherapy treatments.

Bodies don't mark off some for intellectual achievement and others for backbreaking labor.  Failure to innovate, to listen, to teach creatively and constructively are the central barriers to achievement in mathematics.  May Everly's tribe increase, and may her work continue to inspire and bear fruit for all children.

An Outpouring of Thanks for My Last Post: Here's What I Think It Means

When I posted last Friday about dealing with my emotional/intellectual/spiritual/material struggles with professorial and professional work, I kept hearing in the back of my head some advice about preaching and teaching I received long ago.  I believe it is good advice, which is why I keep it close in mind.  I was warned not to let my sermons and teaching presentations get too focused around my own experiences.  First, it betrays a kind of egocentrism (even egotism) that seems to think of oneself as the prime example of whatever topic is at hand.  Second, it presumptuously asserts that one's own experiences are the same as those who are hearing what one says.  I do agree that these are dangers and temptations.

Yet there is another side of this question about whether to use one's own experiences in teaching and preaching.  That side is the one that recognizes preaching and teaching is in part about building a relationship of teaching-learning between the teacher and the people in the classroom or other setting.  That relationship itself becomes a powerful part of a teaching-learning process.

In the past few days, some of the most encouraging words of appreciation I received were from fellow academics, people who find themselves in a similar functional role as I do.  Although I did not get too heavily into details of my own struggle, I tried to reveal enough to make some sense of it to readers.  Apparently it did make some sense, and there have been a wide range of responses.

Through the past two years, one of the most common responses to my writing about Everly, cancer, struggle, death, loss, and faith, have been those from people who told how my writing honestly about the struggle helped them to think about and deal with struggles in their own lives.  Over and over people have encouraged me to keep on writing, as many of you did this past weekend.

One colleague who wrote some beautiful encouragement to me sparked me to think about how dealing with this struggle has affected my teaching.  So I'm going to post here a response I sent to him about what I think it means that students are finding blessing in my current teaching.  Again, for all who teach and preach, I hope this will give some insight into why a certain kind of telling one's own story and reflecting on one's own faith can make a great difference in teaching and learning.

Thanks.  It has emerged through these two years since Everly's diagnosis in April of 2012 that my lived theological reflection is among the most important parts of my teaching.  As you indicated during your presentation last week, a personal story is powerful for impact and memory.  Add to that my sometimes raw emotions, and the students find this part of my reflection to serve their learning in many ways. 

At perhaps the first level, my up-to-date reflections as I "go through" are an example of how theology operates in a lived context with real questions people are asking.  So I will keep writing and bringing my reflections to the classroom as I make this pilgrimage that will not end until I end.

At another level, my reflections become a mirror to them.  While they are not going through the same thing (although sometimes it is very close with a terminally ill spouse or other family member), they are finding analogies to my story in their story.  Sometimes this has led to powerful testimony or confession on the part of a student in class who becomes willing to let her or his struggle become part of our conversation.  I have to say that they get a bit less "respect" from their peers, in that classmates feel more permission to comment on one another didactically than they do to comment in that way on my stories.  But that gives me a chance to talk about how we listen and do not rush to offer easy answers. 

Maybe it's a third level at which they find themselves in a new relation with me, walking along as a fellow struggler.  There is no small amount of recurring reference to Claypool's sermons in my ongoing reflections, as you may have noted in my refrain about walking one step at a time.  I don't doubt that this third element is significant in my being asked to preach by one of our students for the first time in fourteen years of teaching at the seminary.  Over the years, there have always been a small cadre of students who saw in me a colleague or mentor, someone whose overall faith and walk they might hope to emulate.  But they have been few, and it has much to do with my personality and background.  That seems to have changed as I have changed during this crisis.  Many more see in me an example of faith from whom they would hope to learn, not just a guy who knows about so many things and so many words and so many people. 

So I will, as best I can, try to let this season reshape me as a teacher.  It's strange that some of my most effective classroom teaching may be going on when I am by habits and performance so far from what I ought to be as a professor.  Bringing some of those good habits back into my daily life can perhaps give me a decade or so of teaching that will be the best of my career.

Do You Want to Be Healed? Conversating Down by the Pool of Bethesda

Scholars classify the sayings of Jesus in various ways:  parables, aphorisms, dialogues, etc.  Some who have studied them have focused on conversations or "interviews" Jesus has with various people.  Preachers in our individualistic age particularly love these sorts of sayings.  In such conversations, a sermon can leverage Jesus' compassion, wisdom, or straightforward (even harsh) truthfulness into an assumed conversation between the Lord and the person in the pew.  Probably most who read this have heard a sermon on this text.

Sometimes these Gospel stories portray Jesus asking a question of someone.  One favorite such question appears in the encounter between Jesus and a paralytic man by the Pool of Bethesda.  In this conversation, Jesus asks the man, "Do you want to be made well?"  The man had lay by the pool, reputed to have intermittent healing powers, for a very long time.  Read superficially, the question almost seems like small talk:  "Hi, there.  How's it going?  Are you hanging out here to be healed?  Good seeing you today!" 

But when we let the question soak in a bit, it becomes a kind of probing, even intense question.  It pushes past superficiality and goes to the heart.  Having been there so long, waiting ostensibly to be healed, was this man finally resigned to stay as he was, content with things as they are?  Certainly, even in hard situations, we often find some level of satisfaction, some reward even in our disappointment, some ease in having settled for things as they are.

It's a harsh question; perhaps, even rude.  The man answered defensively by saying that no one would help him get to the water when the healing powers were present.  One might imagine his answering in our age by saying, "You don't know me!  You can't judge me!  Who do you think you are?"   It was that kind of hard question, forcing the issue, pressing past the excuses.  If listened to carefully, it was a disorienting question.

I have thought a lot about this passage during the past month.  I have started meeting with a counselor for help in facing my life without Everly.  It is a reorienting process.  I am living in a season of uncertainty, trying to imagine a different life than continuing to serve God as Everly and I grow old together.  The rest of my growing old will be without her.  What will that be like? 

I probably "put too much of my business out in the street," but the writing itself is a very powerful process for my self-understanding.  So here I go again.

Even before Everly was diagnosed with cancer, I was dealing with some problems.  Relationships at work had gone sour in several cases.  Some colleagues were eager to see me gone from the faculty, and there was a corresponding trend of vocal disapproval by some students that was eating at me.  At my annual physical, my physician said I was showing signs of depression.  I found it hard to go to the office, and when there I found it hard to concentrate and get my work done. 

As most of us would, I came up with various plans by which I would get my life back on track.  I made regular commitments to myself to set up a schedule, to segregate my activities, to improve my habits.  Nothing that I was trying was making much difference.  Everly was concerned, but at a loss on how to help me.  Moreover, her own stressful job was enough for her to handle.  She could not carry my load, too. 

So for several years, I floundered, trying to recover the productivity of my earlier years.  I accomplished some big things during that time.  I helped lead some statewide organizing work among theologians and IAF groups dealing with the economy.  I became involved in the same work on a national basis, even chaired some major national meetings among PICO, IAF, and other local organizing groups.  I received honors for this work.  I wrote and delivered theological papers which received praise from many scholars.  I helped rebuild a robust faculty senate at the university. 

But in between the big events, I often found it nearly impossible to make progress on daily work.  It became my new mode of life.  I got used to it.  I was not sure things would ever be different.  I wondered why I was staying in my profession.

The first big question I needed to face in counseling was this:  "What are the rewards I get by avoiding my daily tasks and putting off work that I need to do?"  It was a surprising question, a way of looking at the problem from a different angle.  Anxiety, regret, guilt, disappointment in myself, little hope for change--these were the ways that I would have described my situation.  They are not what one would normally call rewards.  But it seemed a worthy question, and I mulled it over for days. 

What began to emerge was a sense of the way that occasional anxiety and guilt mixed with longer periods of ignoring and denying other things I needed to do was a kind of reward.  I could avoid the more intense anxieties that came up when I pressed into my work--the philosophical struggle with the validity of grades, the disappointment of occasional plagiarized work, the marginalization within the office politics.  These rewards had become the minimal compensation that came from not dealing with the harder matters in my life.

So it is no surprise that my life did not make a sudden upturn when we discovered Everly had cancer, and we struggled through those fifteen months of fear and hope and loss.  Our focus shifted toward supporting her through pain and treatments.  We had to think about the possibilities of her death and its effect on the children and me.  We had our ups and downs, and we had even begun to think that she might be able to live with the cancer for several more years.  But all of that gave me very justifiable reasons not to deal with my own problems at work. 

The grief of losing Everly has been immeasurable.  I have spent much of my energy working on grief, writing about grief and faith, telling the story of what Everly meant to us and to the world, and trying to keep taking one step after another.  Recently, however, a pastor friend told me, with some insistence, that it was time for me to seek some counseling help.  I had made good headway in dealing with grief, but the enormity of the loss and the complexity of my other problems would probably greatly benefit from someone who could help guide me through the process.  Since I had asked for his opinion, I thought it right that I would follow his suggestion.  And so far it has meant trying to unravel the knots in which I have gotten myself over many years. 

Having started working on that first question about what rewards I might find in continuing the way I have been living, we pretty quickly moved on to a second question:  "Can you imagine a situation in which you do your daily work without dread, without it causing you so much anxiety?"  And there again I was with another door to open, another knot to untie.  Knowing how things are and what gives me an overwhelming sense of dread, could I see a way to face those things with creativity and energy to see the possibilities for good, not just for more pain? 

Ultimately, I realized I was being asked the question Jesus asked the man at the Pool of Bethesda.  "Mike, do you want to be healed?"  Or was I satisfied that nothing I do would make things better, that the mess I was in was inescapable, that I was destined to be a diminished version of what I once was.  In recent months, I had been talking to close friends about a similar question I was posing to myself.  "Somewhere under the layers of disappointment and frustration, avoidance and waning hope, was the person still in there who once was known always to take initiative, to press through problems, to bear the load when needed, to lead when others faltered?" 

I remember being a different sort of person at home, at work, at church.  But the memory was fading.  I could not untie the knots that bound my energy.  I could not find and assemble the pieces that could that happen again.  I knew that Everly had admired that person.  I feared I had disappointed her as I shrank into a smaller person.  And I no longer had her beside me to hold me up and believe in me when it was hard to believe in myself.  Could those virtues I once displayed ever return?  Could new virtues take seed and grow?

So I don't think I am just parroting "positivity" or "visualizing a better life" when I say that I realized there can be a situation in which my work does not cause me pain and anxiety.  The joy has never left some parts of the work.  It has even grown and flourished as I taught this year, forced by my grief to be more publicly "real" as a person and not just a professorial persona.  Seeking out the comfort and guidance of friends has helped me feel less alone in the world.  Drawing near to my children has reminded me of much of my purpose for living and the fruit that my life already has borne.  Taking on myself the task of continuing a beautiful life that I lived with Everly has inspired me to get serious about how I spend the remainder of my years.

Yes.  I do want to be healed.  Even though the sociality of existence means that others have played a role in my frustrations, I can't continue to leave my destiny in the hands of people who have gone on to other things.  There is a door that has opened, and some strings hanging from the knots have been pulled loose and are longer than they used to be.  Small steps, small accomplishments, small satisfactions--this is the path I am on. 

Good people have agreed to support me with regular conversation and prayer.  I'm not walking alone.  Another crowd of witnesses, a communion of saints, encompasses me.  Loved ones and friends are pulling for me.  My students are a great well of refreshing as they also learn about holding their faith in struggle and about understanding the depths of pain and grief through my teaching.  I cannot help but be aware of the work of the Holy Spirit to guide my feet, order my steps, and make a way out of no way. 

Jesus asked the man a question that got to the heart of the matter.  In this season, I've once again taken up that inquiry. 

Facing My Shortcomings

I had a conversation with my son earlier this week.  He was commenting about preparing for guests in his apartment, and somewhat amused that he was trying to make sure that they did not make fun of his housekeeping after they leave.  He said that he was trying to think about what people who visit other people might deem to be important.

As is often the case with my children, I take something they say to me and begin to associate it with various theoretical understandings of ethics or theology or history or whatever pops into my mind.  This is often accepted with interest if I don't push it too far.  What I usually do, however, is drone on too long until they are wishing they had never started the conversation.  I did that again, comparing the development of conscience, that shared (con-) knowledge (science) that is held in communities, growing out of the way we come to understand and internalize what others believe is important.  Blah blah blah blah blabitty blah blah.

Yet I have had to relive that conversation over and over again as the week had dragged on.  It is grading week.  I am the worst of grading procrastinators.  And each day as I have struggled to get on with my duty, I have realized that getting my work done has depended to a great deal on having Everly in my life.  I know I have to be honest and face her if I am profligate.  This is the first grading period I have had since she died.  And the tendency toward being what Aristotle called the "weak-willed" person is stronger than ever.  Here and now, facing my shortcomings, I am reminded again of how Everly made me stronger than I am alone.

Writing in New Places

Spring and summer were hectic with preparations to relocate.  I am going to be living in Austin, Texas (sort of).  Everly, my wife, is now changing the world in Austin.  I am overjoyed to finally be joining her.  I will still, however, be teaching at Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, NC.  And we are not buying a house yet, so I'm fulfilling my parents' nightmare by moving back in with them at 53.

Education is changing, and graduate education is no exception.  I will be teaching in a hybrid format.  Five times each semester, I will be present in the classroom in Raleigh with students.  The rest of the time will be online, group sessions in my absence, teleconferences, and guest speakers.  I like it better than purely online teaching, which I did this past year with only minimal satisfaction.  There is much to learn to get the right habits to teach students online.  I'm still learning it.

So the truck is loaded, the house here for me to stay in when I travel back to teach, and I'm full of memories, hopes, and wondering about what is coming.  I'll be writing from Austin, Salado, Durham, Raleigh, and who knows where in the coming year.

Why We Must Teach What We Know

My friend Alan Bean, one of the first activists to break the story of the Jena 6, has written a story about the struggle to continue to teach the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights advances in a generation which cannot remember how significant the small steps were in this struggle. In his article, "The Face of White Supremacy," Bean describes an actual argument going on in the development of history courses for public education. Old prejudices die slowly, even when people hardly ever say them out loud anymore. Those who remember must tell the story.

Celebrating a Leader in Math Education

This week began with milestones to celebrate. Everybody knows about Tuesday, but that was the second one for me. On Monday, Everly Broadway, my beloved, successfully defended her dissertation: African American Achievement in High School Mathematics. It is a study of how reforming curriculum can influence achievement for all students, with special attention to the way that a better designed curriculum can benefit African American students. I am now proud to be married to Dr. Broadway, the degree soon to be officially conferred.

For some time, educators have discussed the “achievement gap” between minorities and white students in the U. S. education system. Many have focused research on the school atmosphere and the teachers’ ways of interacting with students. Habits of low expectations for minority students influence the ways some teachers teach. Research into different expectations of girls and boys in math class has led to significant insight into the ways teachers interact with students. Gender research has helped to bolster the recognition that race, ethnicity, and economic level may affect the expectations and teaching practices of classroom teachers.

Embedded deeper in the teaching of mathematics is a cultural assumption that only an elite few people are smart in mathematics. This assumption about a born elite has sometimes been referred to in shorthand as “the math gene.” So thorough is this cultural formation that no one is surprised to hear a highly competent professional adult say, “I’ve always been bad at math.” Earlier education research addressed the problem as “math anxiety.”

Dr. Broadway has been driven by, among many issues, the way that this view of mathematics is so thoroughly naturalized in the culture at large, and particularly in the culture of education. I don’t know how many times she has asked me questions like: “Why do people think it’s fine for only 10% to succeed in math? Why would teachers be satisfied to assume that almost all students in high school cannot learn math?”

Based on her findings, this is not the assumption of many other education systems in other parts of the world. Moreover, where the education system does not assume “the math gene,” teachers, mathematicians, administrators, and school counselors take on the challenge of conducting research and finding ways to do a better job of teaching math to all students. If you already believe that 90% will not be able to cut it, that puts the whole system off the hook for not doing better at bringing all students up to the standard.

Dr. Broadway has taken up with civil rights veteran activists and historians, such as Bob Moses, Charles Cobb, and Charles Payne, and mathematician and educational reformer Carol Malloy, sharing their cause of analyzing and closing the achievement gap in mathematics. They have described access to courses in higher mathematics as one of the great civil rights struggles of this era. Part of the problem is that too many schools have designed their math curriculum to delay or discourage students from starting to take higher math courses. Along with the structural barriers, so many families and neighborhoods are full of discouraged people who fear that since they had a hard time in math, their children will not be good at it. As with any struggle to open up opportunity, there is the need to change both the structures of power and the hopes of those who have not had access.

How often have teachers, frustrated that a student does not quickly “get it” in algebra class concluded that the student just does not have what it takes to succeed in math? How often have teachers, who found math easy as students, assumed that the way they were taught must be the best or only way to teach math courses? How often have well-meaning school counselors discouraged students from taking higher math courses on the assumption that they would find them too challenging and probably fail? How often have school administrators made judgments about tracking students into lower math courses because they are used to seeing certain groups do poorly in math? How often has the motivation to push more students into learning higher math been undermined in part by the conflicting short-term goal of keeping scores up on high-stakes tests in algebra and geometry?

Dr. Broadway’s research looks at new ways of designing high school math curriculum which show promise in helping all students achieve in math. Her research shows that when African American students are given opportunities to take higher level math courses, they can succeed in them. It shows that the curriculum design which links mathematics to real problems from science, from professions, from economics, from public policy—from the kinds of things that matter to human living—students who have been assumed not to be capable of “getting it,” can “get it.” Better math curriculum design delivered to all students makes “the math gene” appear as what it is—a myth. School systems committed to success in math for all students can make headway across the board, and the achievement gap can be narrowed. Over time, perhaps it can even disappear.

Dr. Broadway’s research examines the qualitative research, and has much promise to offer in this area. At its core, however, it is a quantitative study of achievement. The results on the initial high school math course leave no doubt. Better courses can improve math learning for African American students, and they can make a dramatic difference in a short time.

The disappearance of the achievement gap probably will not be immediate, but it is not so far away as most would assume. Much effort is being proposed and even carried out to make sure that children of all economic levels get a good start in school from an early age. Finding ways to back away from the industrial sized schools toward more high-touch schools closer to where children live is gaining momentum. Linking education to mentoring, internships, and specialized training is making a comeback. Changing our ways of thinking about math learning is an important next step. Dr. Broadway is committed to opening the doors so that “every child can achieve in higher mathematics.” I have heard her say those words hundreds of times, and it is her passion. There are many reasons why these words are true, and the rest of us need to join her to see that this mission will be carried forward.