When I was just starting out as a teacher, I asked the founders of our small mountaintop school why they started the school to begin with. They said that in the early seventies, there were very few public schools in the area that served the local population in rural south Santa Cruz County, and they firmly believed that everyone deserved a good education. I actually got many different answers to “why are we here,” but the simplicity of this one stuck with me. We all deserve a good education. Later on in my career, after I had done a few things that attracted some attention, I was hired as a…
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A Guiding Value: Selfless Community Service
If you want to have new ideas, innovate, rise up from depression or heal a wound, the most direct path you can take to your goal is to forget about yourself for a time. I have wonderful ideas when I am washing dishes or running. I’m pretty sure the running ideas are from how fast the blood is pumping through my brain, but the dishwashing is because I am not thinking about “me” while I do it. An even better way to pause destructive or negative thinking is to get involved in a service project. When I first arrived at Mount Madonna School as a new teacher, fresh out of…
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Visible and Invisible
This year I have the honor of guiding our senior class in carrying out a capstone project. They came into the first day of classroom work with ideas of wanting to help everything and everybody, locally and around the world, in every possible way. They had no idea how beautiful a concept this was, or what a gift their priorities are to our area. For anyone who has ever had a loss of faith in the upcoming generation or a draining away of hope for the future, I can assure you, there are young people who are ready to serve. As the students narrowed their ideas down and honed the…
