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A Cup of Strength

A couple of nights ago, as I was getting ready for bed, a song from decades past popped into my head.  It has a dissonant, forlorn tune*, which somewhat matched my mood.  I think I sang it as part of high school all-state honor choir.  Its lyrics are from George Eliot's poem, "The Choir Invisible".  I found myself singing the last stanza of her poem:

May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

The poet talks about what she hopes her legacy is after she dies.  Think about the many who "live again" when we remember the legacy that they leave us.  Someone famous?  A loved one?  Someone taken too soon by a disease or by violence?

The start of her poem is:

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
Of miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men’s minds
To vaster issues.

Seeing the peaceful protests on TV for the Black Lives Matter movement, seeing social media posts about wearing a mask to show respect and care for strangers, and seeing people rally together for the good of others made me recall the legacy that I hope to leave my students:  

Read Daily - Listen More - Love One Another - Change the World. 

Reading widely and diversely can teach you to listen more to the struggles of others.  It can teach you empathy for a life you will never live.  Reading can teach you to love others, and in doing so, in setting aside your selfishness, you can change the world.  You can be a cup of strength for someone without even knowing it.  

I had planned to reflect, in this post, on what I learned from being an online instructor this past spring.  How could I better help the teachers in my school?  How would my professional goals change?  What potential was there for maintaining disruptive educational technology implementation in my "normal" library lessons?  

But then I thought it might be better to share book titles that our school library has purchased over the last 6 years, specifically for diversity, as I have seen several lists shared online, and there are so many other great titles out there.

Click here to see some of what our school library has purchased in an effort to broaden the diversity within our collection.  (These aren't specifically for teaching about racism, but many of them could fall into that category.)  Consider which of these you could add to your classroom library or to your child's personal library.  

*Click here to listen to the same rendition of "The Choir Invisible" that I sang all those years ago.  This one was sung by the Houston Chamber Choir, 2018.







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