​Last month, my husband and I hiked the Camino in Spain.  The thousand-year-old pilgrimage road is a lot like life.  Parts are densely forested, only a pinprick of light visible through an arcade of trees.  Some sections stretch flat and open, an easy day’s hike.  Others are uphill – old Roman roads so rocky, muddy, and slick that to lift your gaze from the stones ahead invites a fall. Then there are summits that afford mountain views over vineyards, olive groves, and ultimately, the verdant pastures of Galicia. Glorious heights that allow you to look back and marvel at it all.  Awash in gratitude.

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
Thomas Alva Edison 

“I know of no genius, but the genius
​of hard work.”
J.M.W. Turner

What does the Romantic artist of turbulent seas share with the American inventor of the lightbulb?  A common appreciation of why and how they succeeded.  Widely acclaimed in their lifetimes as “pure genius,” the two trailblazers begged to differ: their most inspired creations, they insisted, were not attributable to boundless talent, but to relentless effort, hard work, and willingness to return to the drawing board. 
 
In the case of English painter J.M.W. Turner, “back to the drawing board” was a way of life.  A prodigy by age 10, he left behind more than 30,000 drawings and sketches for his over 550 oils and 2,000 watercolor paintings.  By contrast Thomas Edison was a late-bloomer, whose childhood bout with scarlet fever impaired his hearing from an early age and who struggled in school.  But “the Wizard of Menlo Park” is credited with more than a thousand patented inventions (among them the light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera) and founding fourteen companies.  Edison (like Turner) attributed his successes to his eighteen-hour days and the fact that he did not resent dead-ends. “I have not failed seven hundred times,” he insisted with his work on the lightbulb. “I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work… I will find the way that will work.”  And he did.
 
Until recently we might have considered Turner’s and Edison’s shared insight just personal opinion.  Weren’t talent and aptitude the real key?  But University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth has provided empirical evidence for the truth of their claims. Her work on “grit” shows that effort (perseverance) and attitude (passion) trump talent and socio-economic background as a predictor of success.  When she was growing up, Duckworth’s father often commented: “You know, you’re no genius.”  After she won the MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes called “the genius grant,” for her work on character development and human flourishing, he didn’t eat his words. 
 
Why? Because Duckworth’s work showed that success and accomplishment derive from effort, attitude, and driving passion more than brilliance and privilege.  Key to attitude, Duckworth found, was the understanding that failure is a step on the path to knowledge, and helps us learn. That understanding allows students to persevere.  Duckworth’s work also showed that “gritty” qualities could be acquired and enhanced.  Check out her fascinating work at angeladuckworth.com and see her TED talk there too. 
 
In October, as students hunker down to serious study, some may grow discouraged that they are not (oh darn….) geniuses, and that academic success does not come easily.  For every child who quickly cracks the language code and reads at age six, there are dozens more who struggle to make sense of squiggles on the page.  For every student who aces timed math drills and lives for the spelling bee, there are countless others, who panic and blank. Our job as teachers is not just to introduce children to new content and skills, but to help strengthen their spirit and ensure that kids do not lose heart.
 
This month we’ve showcased many books that celebrate the efforts of those who’ve faced great obstacles, and pushed themselves hard to overcome each one.   Patricia Polacco’s picture book account of her own battle with dyslexia (Thank You, Mr. Falker), Dawn Fitzgerald’s account of Lincoln’s sculptress Vinnie Ream, and Marty Kaminsky’s anthology of “Uncommon Champions:  Fifteen Athletes Who Battled Back” are three such inspirational works. They remind us that human beings can reach deep within, keep-a-going, and that the old saying “practice makes perfect” is not just a hackneyed phrase, but an empirical reality.  

One of the world’s greatest story tellers, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote a famous version of a folktale that exists in several countries and cultures around the world.  It is called “The Old Grandfather and His Little Grandson.”  It is the story of people losing respect for another person and how a child helps them see their error and regain respect.
 
The grandfather had become very old. His legs would not carry him, his eyes could not see, his ears could not hear, and he was toothless. When he ate, bits of food sometimes dropped out of his mouth. His son and his son’s wife no longer allowed him to eat with them at the table. He had to eat his meals in the corner near the stove.  One day they gave him his food in a bowl. He tried to move the bowl closer; it fell to the floor and broke. His daughter-in-law scolded him. She told him that he spoiled everything in the house and broke their dishes, and she said that from now on he would get his food in a wooden dish. The old man sighed and said nothing.  A few days later, the old man’s son and his wife were sitting in their hut, resting and watching their little boy playing on the floor. They saw him putting together something out of small pieces of wood. His father asked him, “What are you making, Misha?” The little grandson said, “I’m making a wooden bucket. When you and Mama get old, I’ll feed you out of this wooden dish.”
The young peasant and his wife looked at each other and tears filled their eyes. They were ashamed because they had treated the old grandfather so meanly, and from that day they again let the old man eat with them at the table and took better care of him.
 
Respect is a virtue, a habit which is central to human happiness.  The core meaning of the word “respect” is to give something or someone particular attention and consideration.  To respect someone means you recognize that he or she is important and deserves to be treated well.  Like each of us, that person has a mind and human feelings.
 
In our story, the mother and father lost “sight” of the old man.  Gradually, they forgot that he was person and began treating him as if he hardly existed.  Just “something” that irritated and got in their way.  In effect, they stopped “seeing” the old man.  By trying to make a wooden bowl, the type a dog would eat from, the boy’s actions shocked his parents into recognizing how they had lost “sight” for the old man and had stripped him of the respect he deserved.
 
Clearly, the old man had gradually came to annoy his son and daughter-in-law.  The respect they once had for him was overtaken by their feelings of frustration and exasperation.  It is very natural in life to develop feeling toward people who appear to be getting in the way of what we want.  Or people that we just don’t like.  Such feelings can become habits, habits which blind us from seeing deeper into others and denying them the respect that is due them.
 
It is easy to respect people we like, people we like to be around and people who like us.  People who have the virtue of respect have done the often-hard work of, first, understanding the essential value of all people, and, second, acting in a “respectful” manner toward others.  However, understanding without action is empty.  It was not enough for the boy’s parents to recognize that they had lost respect for the old man.   They took the action-step to correct their mean behavior and bring him back to the family table.  Respect needs action.
 
One final point.  The virtue of respect looks in two directions.  It looks outward and it looks inward.  Our story is about outward respect and the boy’s parents seeing their outward lack of respect and correcting it.  There is, also, respect for ourselves.  Many people over the course of time lower their regard for themselves and what they can and should be.  They get disappointed with how they are living their lives.  They lose sight of what they are capable of becoming.  They come to “dislike” and disrespect themselves.  Having lost sight of the respect they should have for themselves, it is so easy to lose respect for those around them.
 
Reading great stories, both from history and in fiction, puts us in contact with examples of people living virtuous lives.  We see examples of people who have formed good habits and treat those around them with the respect they deserve.  Read well, these stories can be a major source of inspiration for us to be all we can be. 
 
Edmund Burke, (1729-1797) a famous Irish statesman, summed up the power that human example can have on us this way: “Example is the school of mankind.”

-Kevin Ryan

       “Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen, to music, play a sport.”      Pope Francis
     
      Here we stand on the shore of summer, a time for leisure or “sacred idleness,” as philosophers have described it. We take a break from formal schooling, though we do not take a break from learning or virtue.  How marvelous that the Greek word for leisure – skole – became the basis of our word school.  It is a splendid reminder that we are educated and grow wiser not simply from our labors, but from our leisure: all of it --  the outdoor activities that lift our hearts, the family picnics and outings, the trips we take, the books we devour, the poetry, concerts, and works of art that inspire us, and the engrossing conversations with long-neglected friends.
       This summer, whether your leisure is spent by the shore, on the sea, in the mountains, at a lake, or in your own hometown, we hope you’ll allow leisure to become your school, a time of rest and inspiration. “There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature,” Henry David Thoreau reminds us. Thoreau also reminds us that “a broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book… Observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.”  That is, of course, unless your leisure is a Road Trip!

​“The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” wrote the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle in 1840.   Perhaps if he were writing today, Carlyle would say “great men and women,” but he voiced an important theory of human history’s unfolding.  Our story, he claimed, owes its contours to the ideas and actions of heroic individuals in key times and places.  Distinguished by their personal qualities and the inner spark that guides them, “heroes” exert a dramatically disproportionate effect on their times.  For better or for worse, he said, they are the creators, “natural luminaries,” and “modelers” who bring new things into existence and inspire the admiration of others. 
​
​Historians and writers who shared Carlyle’s perspective in the nineteenth century pointed out that “great men” were not always good men.  Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Atilla the Hun, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed a place in the pantheon, as did Pericles, Jesus, Muhammad, Shakespeare, and Luther.  Had he lived to the twentieth century, Carlyle would surely have had to spotlight  Stalin and Hitler, in addition to Churchill and FDR.  The “Great” were sometimes, but not always the virtuous. 
 
Herbert Spencer, Carlyle’s contemporary, insisted that the Romantic Scot got it all wrong.  “Great Men,” he claimed were simply products of their social environment and indeed all of human history could be explained by impersonal social forces that were largely beyond the control of individuals, and which, in fact, molded the imagined great men.  (Not surprisingly, Spencer wrote the Study of Sociology in 1896.)
 
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries scholars have straddled these two extremes.  Yes, we need to give historical circumstance and social environment their due, but are human beings really just “history’s slaves,” as Tolstoy hinted in War and Peace?  If so, how does one explain Dante Alighieri or Joan of Arc?  Alexander Hamilton or the Grimke sisters?  Abraham Lincoln or Clara Barton? Oscar Schindler or Irena Sendler*? Mohandes Ghandi or Mother Teresa?  ​

Decades ago the expressions “Don’t toot your own horn” and “Don’t get too big for your britches” were considered wise parental correctives for cocky kids.  Boastfulness (though enshrined in the literature of American tall-tales) was perceived as a grave character flaw in public life – so much so that Abe Lincoln made humorous humility his trademark.  When accused of being “two-faced” by Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln quipped: “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?”
 
Fast-forward 150 years, and such self-effacing discourse is hard to find.  Our President tweets that he is “really smart … a very stable genius.”  The Minority Leader assures us “I am a master legislator” and “the biggest fund raiser in the country.” They’re both in their late seventies, so they should know better, but not so you’d notice.
​
They mirror a general culture enamored of Self.  Self esteem. Self promotion.  Self assertion. Self confidence. Self efficacy. Selfies…. Psychologists note the rise of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the general population, and most worrisome: the incidence of this disorder (largely undetected only two decades ago) is three times higher for people in their twenties than for those sixty-five and older.  In this environment, does humility stand a chance?  And what is humility anyway?
​
Humility is not regarding oneself as worthless.  Only the obsequious and pathologically depressed wander into that territory. Aristotle taught that virtue lies in the mean between two extremes.  Hence, humility is the mean between self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. 

The humble person recognizes her strengths, but eagerly seeks to understand the strengths of others; she knows her own weaknesses and assumes others have theirs. The humble person is inclined—since she is one and others are many, since all of us are part of the human community—to be fundamentally interested in “the other.”  The humble person moves beyond self toward the other. Evangelical pastor and inspirational speaker Rick Warren got it right when he wrote: “true humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” 
​
When we consider the heroically humble figures of our time, Mother Teresa comes to mind.  As she lifted the poor and the dying off the streets of Calcutta, finding them shelter and rest in their final days, she provoked controversy. Hers was not a “systemic” solution to the problem of poverty, some complained.  How much could this band-aid help or matter?  It mattered to the ones she took off the streets, Mother Teresa responded calmly.  She went on to establish convents and homes for those dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis around the world.  The religious order she founded, the Missionary Sisters of Charity, now operates homes for the dying, orphanages, soup kitchens, clinics and dispensaries for the poorest of the poor in over one hundred and thirty countries. 

Mother Teresa’s humility, her radical love of neighbor, was inspired by the Lord she followed.  Jesus urged his disciples to wash the feet of those they served, to take up their cross, to stand firm but humble when mocked and derided.  Jesus was not alone in praising those who were “meek and humble of heart.”  His Jewish forefathers warned consistently against those who were “haughty of heart.”  And four hundred years before Christ, the Buddha cautioned his followers against “self-seeking and conceit,” urging them to be “mindful of the kindness and not the faults of others,” and to pursue “lowliness.” Islam’s prophet Muhammad also taught, “Humility increases the dignity of one endowed with it. Be humble and Allah will exalt you.” Are the leaders of so many of the world’s foremost religious faiths missing the mark?

Humility is freeing.  It encourages us not to take ourselves too seriously. “Humility is the mother of all virtues,” Mother Teresa wrote.  “If you are humble, nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.  If you are blamed, you will not be discouraged.  If they call you a saint, you will not put yourself on a pedestal.” 
​
In April, we work toward a world in which fewer people are jostling for the pedestals.

Compassion is feeling the pain of others and acting to end their distress.  Our March Core Virtues definition springs from the Latin roots of the word itself:  “Com”—to stand with the other; “passion”—we enter into his or her pain.  The compassionate person reaches out to those in need, seeking to serve rather than be served.  The names Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer, and Clara Barton leap to mind as modern representatives of that ancient virtue.  Jesus and the Buddha are religious embodiments, who inspire their followers. 
 
We see compassion in action daily, though it’s not usually front-page news.  Compassion motivates the many who staff town soup kitchens and homeless shelters, who volunteer at nursing homes or crisis pregnancy centers, who teach English to local immigrant families or assist with their housing, who volunteer in literacy programs, or donate to the Red Cross or Wounded Warriors. It inspires those who work for hunger relief and potable water worldwide.
 
Compassion is the virtue that springs from the other “coms” in our lives:  community, commitment and commiseration, leading finally to communion – or oneness with our fellows.  It is born of the visceral understanding that we are all in this together, bound by struggle, by pain, and ultimately, by hope. 
 
Every so often, one breathtaking embodiment of the virtue of compassion stops us in our tracks.  Here’s a recent one.  On September 23, 2017 an Albuquerque police officer saw a man and woman seated in a grassy area, preparing to shoot up with heroin.  They were oblivious to the officer, and as he approached Officer Ryan Holets realized that the woman was very pregnant. With his body camera rolling, he asked the woman, “why are you goin’ to be doing this stuff… you’re gonna kill your baby.” A drugged, emotional mother wept and agonized with the officer about her child’s future.  She revealed that she planned to give the child up for adoption, but her worst fear was that the child would be taken by the State and end up in a horrible foster care situation. 
 
Ryan Holets said it was clear to him that despite her unwise choices, this mother loved her baby, and while they talked she put aside the needle.  He went back to his car to think and knew what he was being called to do. When he returned to Crystal Champs, the expectant mother, he didn’t arrest the woman and her partner.  He showed her a photo of his wife and four children (all under age five), and said, “We’ll adopt your baby.  We’ll raise her.”  He gave them his phone number, and a heart-felt offer of a future for her child.  
 
That night, Rebecca Holets, Ryan’s extraordinary wife, listened in awe to what her husband told her about his day.  Rebecca was still nursing their ten-month-old, yet the two had discussed becoming foster parents before:  they felt in the future they had more parenting love to give.  The future was here, and Rebecca was excited.  A week later, Crystal and her partner agreed to the adoption, and in October, Crystal delivered a baby girl.  The infant went through the struggles of meth withdrawal upon birth, but is otherwise healthy.  Eleven days after her arrival in the world, Ryan and Rebecca took their new daughter home.  They named her “Hope.”  
 
This story of communion, borne of compassion, does not end there.  The Holets were from the start concerned about Crystal, and her partner.  They started a “Go Fund Me” page for the two, trying to get them into rehabilitation.  When CNN covered the story in September, a Rehab and Recovery center offered them places and they’ve been in treatment and doing well.  Despite an enormous struggle, the couple has now been sober for more than forty days.
 
The heartbreak in this story is palpable, but so is the compassion shown by so many.  Obviously, there’s the empathy of Officer Holets and his magnanimous wife Rebecca, who saw a human life in the balance, and said “we will do this,” even though the timing for them was not ideal.  Then there was the compassion of the mother, Crystal Champs, who got herself off drugs for the final stretch of her pregnancy and had the largeness of heart and spirit to let her little girl go, to allow her adoption by another family.  Then there’s the compassion of the many people who contributed to the Go Fund Me page for the biological parents, and the Rehab center that offered scholarship treatment for these two people in need. 
 
In this story, we only have heroes and heroines.  Every once in a while, when we are inclined to despair of our grasping, self-serving world, when it seems like everyone around us is elbowing past others and looking out for Number One, we need to be reminded that …. there is Hope.                                                           Mary Beth Klee 

Love of country is an old-fashioned virtue, but one grounded in an important truth: those who love their country, work hardest for its betterment and sacrifice the most for its ideals.  In 240-plus years of American history, love of country has inspired many to go beyond self, putting their lives on the line for their nation and its ideals. We owe a great deal to those heroes who “in liberating strife, more than self their country loved,” as Katherine Lee Bates described them in “America the Beautiful.”  And every February, my own family has special reason to be grateful to those heroes, because, without them, none of us would be here. 
 
Our special date is February third, because on that Saturday night in 1945, the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division and its 44th Tank Battalion crashed through the iron gates of Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.  Hundreds of young GIs liberated nearly four thousand American and Allied civilians.  Those men, women, and seven hundred children had experienced captivity, disease, squalor, cruelty, and unrelenting hunger for more than three years.  Many were dying of starvation.  My mother, sixteen-year-old Leonore (“Lee”) Iserson, was among the cheering throngs who greeted the GIs that night.  
 
Lee and her family, along with thousands of U.S. nationals, had been living and doing business in the Philippines (American territory before the war).  They were caught off guard on December 8, 1941. Just hours after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Rising Sun forces attacked Clark Air Base in Manila and the U.S. fleet at Subic Bay.  By Christmas, American troops under Douglas MacArthur marched out of the city, and on January 2, 1942, the Japanese marched in.  Within a month the Imperial Japanese Army had imprisoned thousands of American and Allied civilians at the University of Santo Tomas, where they were held in deteriorating conditions for thirty-seven months. 
 
On the night that GIs liberated them, young Lee was five-foot-five inches tall and weighed 93 pounds.  Her equally tall mother, Agnes, was down to 87 pounds.  Lee remembered that night well.  “We girls were dressed up because it was a Saturday night, and there were rumors.”  At 9 PM, when tanks with terrifyingly long guns crashed through the camp gates, internees at first feared the worst.  Was this the Japanese military come to finish them off?  But huge uniformed men with submachine guns walked beside the tanks, and a burly mountain of a man with machine gun in hand surged from the well of one tank.  He shot a Japanese guard in a watch tower, and  another tank wheeled around to take out a Japanese machine-gun nest near the Main Building.
 
Shouts of “They’re ours! They’re Americans!” rang out, and delirious internees swarmed the liberators, cheering, blowing kisses, and yes, climbing on the tanks. One GI shouted to an effusive matron:  “Get out of the way, lady. We gotta a war to fight here!”  And another yelled, “Moms and Dads, hold the kids!  Don’t let them on the tanks!”  The ex-prisoners had the presence of mind to back off a bit, and within an hour tanks Battlin’ Basic, Georgia Peach, Ole Miss, and San Antone had secured the camp.   Behind them came dozens of jeeps and the tanks Block Buster and ​Crusader.
 
That night a battle raged outside the gates of Santo Tomas, and even within, a stand-off took place between liberating troops and Japanese soldiers holding hostages in the camp’s Ed Building. But joyful delirium reigned on the university’s front lawn.  One gunner in the tank Ole Miss surveyed the jubilant civilian crowd and drawled, “We been liberatin’ jungles and swamps.  Now, women and children—this is more like it!” 
 
GIs tossed candy bars and Lucky Strikes to the hungry crowds, and children again scrambled up on the tanks to kiss them. In one corner of the university’s front lawn, a small group of internees started singing God Bless America.   Their voices swelled, and as the din subsided, more grateful internees took up the song.  Land that I love.  Stand beside her, and guide her.  My grandmother’s husky alto voice rose for the first time in three years, as strains of Kate Smith’s signature song welled everywhere around them. 
 
Lee recalled: “At that moment pride in my country, so deep that it was almost painful, rushed through me.” Through the night with the light from above.  A crescent moon gleamed overhead and one brilliant star of the Southern Cross seemed to wink right at her.  From the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam.  On the banks of Manila Bay, the entire camp sang, Brits and Aussies happily joining in. Lee sang as loudly as she could.  God bless America, my home sweet home.  God bless America, my home sweet home! In the stillness after the last note, one of the GIs on the San Antone choked out, “I ain’t never heard that sung better.” Tears streamed down his face, and a deafening chorus of cheers erupted from the internees.
 
Throughout her life, Lee would reflect on her family’s extraordinary thirty-seven-month ordeal at Santo Tomas, but also, on the internees' unwavering faith in their country.  “We were sure our boys would be back for us.  We never gave up.” And neither did the U.S. armed forces, those hero-boys from Montana, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Mississippi and Ohio, who were prepared to put their own lives on the line for the freedom of their countrymen.  God bless America.  And God bless those who more than self their country love.
-Mary Beth Klee