When do you think you became to passionate about cultivating a community based on empathy? So a lot of it comes from literature. So my favorite writers Shakespeare, George Elliot, David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, William Tolstoy, they all talk a lot about it. The book I’m teaching to my juniors right now- Middle March by George Elliot- is a beautiful book about the power of empathy. So but I do think it was part of the sixteen years that I’ve spent as the head thinking about what education is all about and what community is all about and realizing that in very very interesting ways George Elliot and David Foster wallace they argue convincingly that we all do believe that we are at the center of the universe and we spend most of our time thinking about ourselves and what we need and that they both make the strong recommendation that empathy is the highest form of humanity if we can master that virtue. And then I just start thinking about all the things we try to do at St. Andrew’s in terms of the community whether it’s working on issues of diversity or whether it’s being in a dorm or playing on an athletic team or having a great class sermon.. I just realized that if people begin to imagine the needs of others it can be transformational and I think it does lead teachers and students to a different way of looking at their lives when they start thinking about that in a powerful way. So I don’t know when it was that i started writing about it. i was probably writing about it as early as 1998 or 1999 but I think especially while you guys have been here I’ve been talking about it and thinking about it a lot and so the English classroom becomes this place where I guess what happens is I teach English and I try to teach works that are provocative and inspiring and it kind of starts to seep into the way I talk about the school like in school meeting or even with the hurricane the fact that had I just taught King Leer I was thinking about King Leer the whole time because there is such an amazing storm scene in the book. So I think it’s through literature and then obviously through the work that so many St. Andrew’s students are doing because I think the St. Andrew’s students excel in this motion. And I don’t think my peer group in high school had much of it that I can remember. When you master the art of empathy, how do you become capable of not letting the sorrows of other effect you? Because I feel like while being such a selfless person, and realy taking on the needs of others, and not just understanding them but trying to help them fix them.. how do you not take it on as your own and let it effect you? I think what Shakespeare and Wallace and Tolstoy would say is that it’s how you create meaning in your own life and keep away feelings of despair and loneliness and disillusionment because there’s only something that you can do for someone else. And there’s always some way for you to imaginatively project yourself into a situation that is more difficult or arduous than the one you’re going through. So you know you take the last 24 hours at St. Andrew’s as an example. As anxious and potentially dangerous as that storm could have been for St. Andrew’s we knew we had this big strong building and the kitchen and the food and we also know that there are so many people outside in the world who don’t have any of those things. But I just think that the empathetic regard to others just keeps us thinking that there are other people out there we can help and we can connect with so I think it’s actually a really optimistic way of living because no matter what despair comes upon an individual family or society we have the capacity and compassion to help them. So I think it’s actually pretty liberating. I was reading a book on leadership last night and it was actually a professor from the Harvard business school who was talking about three different people in society; people who watch passively as their life goes by, people who are completely oblivious to what’s going on, and then people who believe that they have agency and responsibility and power to make change. And I think the empathetic regard gives us all this ability to take care of each other. So the David Foster Wallace famous example which I think I’ve talked about in school meeting you know is that he has this great empathic regard and his example is that he’s at a grocery store and he’s five people deep in a line and he’s really irritated and so he literally wants to just throttle everybody in the line because they’re ahead of him and he’s just tired and he’s worked all day and he just wants to go home and these people are unattractive and a baby’s crying and the mother’s being unfeeling and insensitive to her child and so he curtails the urge to think of himself as a victim of all of this stuff and just starts to think about what it might be like to be that mother or what it might be like to be the cashier or what it might be like to be any of the people and just suddenly he has this epiphany to slow himself down and understand that there’s actually a way to connect to people. So I think it’s about.. what empathy’s about is connection.. forging connections.. so what I’m trying to do in my work here at St. Andrew’s is even if I’m worried about something or concerned about something or stressed about something or anxious with something I always feel like I have the agency to connect with a staff member or faculty member or a student. I could do that all day long and if I did do that all day long my problem would still be there but I’m certainly not going to feel like I’ve been passive all day which is sometimes fear and stress can paralyze people. So I just feel like if you can just engage in the life of community than whatever it is that your worried about is going to actually fall back into its perspective. -Mr. Roach
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:43:36 +0000
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