Zitat des Tages von Dave Eggers:
And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.
Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.
I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.
And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.
The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.
Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.
I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention - they go home, they're finished. They don't stall, they don't do their homework in front of the TV.
You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.
I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.
I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.
So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.
But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.
I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.
I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.
I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.
It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.
You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.
They took my mother's stomach out six months ago.
Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.
To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.
I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.
But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.
There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise.
I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.
You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.
I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.
The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.
People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.
Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.