Welcome to March and the invigorating energy that accompanies Spring :)
In this edition, you will find a number of resources: the latest book from Charles Fadel, Education for the Age of AI, a new report on Improving the K-12 Teacher Experience from the Gallup organization, and an exciting upcoming conference from Next Generation Assessment.
May this be a season of renewal and a re-energizer for the change you are leading or hope to lead in your school or district. This beautiful poem by Ada Limón is both magnificent and galvanizing:
Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
