What are words worth?

They run through your head like a series of faded pictures; a smile here, a laugh there, a couple of sentences spoken in a voice just beginning to become familiar, a few sentences scribbled in haste in a classroom, an unopened email, an image of a young man sitting on the steps or lounging in a chair with his friends, answers given with a bit of nervousness and a lot of motivation during an interview. The feelings and thoughts that populate the room where we sit, remembering Rattan, choke the air, the smiles have disappeared from the faces of a normally boisterous group of students from both years of the MA program. We make our polite speeches that hide more than they reveal, because emotion is something that can only be referred to in a controlled, structured manner in an official forum. But this is necessary too, this acknowledgment that we all share regret at a life cut short all too rudely, that we recognize the irreparable loss that this has forced upon a family and on friends, ...

I'm just back from an hour talking about something I find it difficult to stop talking about, with four others who appear to be somewhat similarly inclined. Not a crowd by any standards, but a group that represents a beginning. The idea to start a book club has been brewing for a while now; every time I find myself in conversation with someone about a book I've read, or a friend asks me to recommend reading for a child with a voracious appetite for the printed word, I can feel a certain excitement about words and the ways in which they turn into stories, offering windows into lives of others, worlds that I would never have access to without the channel created by imagination. Oftentimes these conversations have ended with the suggestion that we should start a book club. After many months of prevarication and a bit of a push from a young friend, it finally happened, and that's how I found myself in the brightly painted library of Little People Tree with four others, talking...

Last night I listened to a Professor of English and Ethnic Studies, Dr Wilfred Samuels, read (rather, sing) the poetry of a man I had heard of but only vaguely. While I am no stranger to African American literature (Alice Walker and Toni Morrison are among my favorite writers), the poetry I was less familiar with--other than of course Maya Angelou whose " I know why the caged bird sings " has inspired many a high school student to delve further into the poetry that breaks free from centuries of oppression. But I suppose those who know African-American literature would know that you cannot speak of the poetry of Black America without speaking of Langston Hughes. Dr Samuel's, in a deep and resonant voice reminiscent of the negro spiritual, gave the audience a Hughes poem that runs as deep as its title: The Negro Speaks of Rivers Says Hughes, in a refrain that runs through the rendering of the poem like an undercurrent to the river of thought itself, "My soul has ...

Three books, a dozen teachers, two expert voices, and a brightly painted room. The result was an hour of reflection and enjoyment, an escape into a space we had forgotten existed. Our own pleasure in the magic woven by words, the ability to travel into experiences not our own, and the possibility of discovering empathies--if not answers--in these narratives. When we at Teacher Plus were wondering what we could do to make the day special for our own community of teachers, we hit upon the idea of a session where teachers would turn listeners--not for the purpose of taking ideas back into their classrooms but to rediscover the simple pleasures of listening to a good story. The books we chose were simple, easy to obtain volumes that told stories that, despite their varied setting, were universal in the themes they addressed: boisterous classrooms, distracted students, difficult teenagers, and the never quite defined aims of education. But these themes were not wrapped in polemic or a...