About Us
Words from the Head of School
The Soul of a Place
Dear Brandeis community,
This year for Yom HaAtzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, we took a new approach to the day’s celebration. In honor of Israel’s 70th birthday, the entire faculty and staff was invited to offer workshops and lessons on Israel and the theme of seven or seventy. Myriad learnings, engagements, and explorations were planned for our kindergarten through seventh grade students. As many of you know, I very much miss being in the classroom with students on a regular basis, so I tend to jump at the opportunity to teach whenever it’s presented to me, which is how I found myself this week preparing a lesson on Yehuda Amichai.
One of my guides in my work as a teacher has long been Kenneth Koch, a poet of the New York School—as it is often called—along with the late great John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and others. In addition to his contributions as a poet, Koch wrote a book called Rose, Where Did You Get that Red? on the question of how to teach great, complex poetry to children. One of Koch’s great innovations as a teacher, in my opinion, is the notion of a “poetry idea” as an entry into writing, a simple distillation of an approach in a poem that helps students begin their own thinking and work. So, for learning about William Blake’s “The Tyger,” the poetry idea was to ask questions of a mysterious and beautiful creature; for Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” it was to write about looking at something in many different ways.
Because my own encounter with the state of Israel was set to the music of Yehuda Amichai, I used his work today. We read two of his poems that echo each other—“North of Beersheba” and “North of San Francisco”—in order to explore the poetry idea that places have souls and feelings. The two poems ask questions about the relationship between these two lands, and the people who inhabit them, which seems an important and fitting way for our middle schoolers to spend some time celebrating Israel. We wrote the poems of our places, then saw how much we could distill the pictures of their souls—down to seven lines, perhaps to seven words.
And this week, as I think about the soul of a place, my mind turns as well to the remarkable and inspiring news that Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his album “Damn.” He is the first popular music artist to have won the Pulitzer outright (Bob Dylan’s oft-cited 2008 win was in fact a “special citation”); that an unabashedly political black rap artist broke through into the vaunted halls of such an august institution says a great deal to me about the soul of this country, and what we are wrestling with in this moment in our history. Here at the Glass household we made Tuesday official Kendrick Lamar Day, and grooved to that album and others of his (I am still partial to his first major label record, "good kid m.A.A.d City"). Sometime I may have to hold a parent coffee to discuss how to listen to rap music with your kids—even on the Pulitzer winners, there are songs I skip—but dancing to Kung Fu Kenny with my daughters felt like a joyful celebration of all that is messy and beautiful about this country of ours.
Wishing you all weekends full of the songs and souls of your places, my friends.
Warmly,
Dan
