How Much Does Knowledge Matter For Teaching

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an editorial that was picked up and run in my region, raising a question about the "most important component of teaching."

The actual issue was the substitute shortage (which I can report, via the experiences of the Board of Directors is severe--they have never had a sub when their kindergarten teacher is absent, but are just shunted into the other K teachers). Ohio has shifted to their own version of a warm body substitute law; in Ohio, if you have a college degree, you can apply for a subject-specific substitute license. IOW, if you have a BA in English, you can be an English class substitute in Ohio. 

Pennsylvania has loosened up the rules as well, including letting near-graduated teacher program students sub and allowing retirees to sub without having to give up pension payments (though no retiree I know, including me, has gotten a call from a district to step in). This measure would loosen things up more. But what raised the question is part of the Post-Gazette's rationale:

Knowledge of the subject matter is the most important component of teaching.

Is it? And if not, what is?

I am a huge believer in the importance of subject matter knowledge. When you are standing in a classroom, there is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about. It helps enormously with classroom management and earning the respect of your students (yes, you have to earn that). It helps you stay fast on your feet and adapt to whatever kind of teachable moment presents itself. 

I'm not saying you have to be the world's foremost expert, nor is your job to strut your stuff as the smartest person in the room. But a teacher who plans to get by by just following the textbook makes me cringe. It's the difference between being a guide who knows the paved path to the destination, but is stumped if anyone takes one step off the asphalt, and a guide who knows every part of the territory, on the path and off, and can guide you to any spot from any other spot. I want a classroom with the latter.

But teaching also involves being able to convey that knowledge you have. Everyone knows (and some have experienced) the cliche of the person who's really smart but can't actually explain what they know to anyone else. You can't be a good guide if you arrived at the destination with no idea how you got there and the only advice you can offer others is to keep hollering, "Well, just go to the place!" You have to be able to break the trip into comprehensible pieces.

And that means you have to understand your audience and read the room. You have to be able to communicate with the young humans that you are supposed to be teaching. For the younger students in particular this means some exceptional communication and empathic skills are required of teachers. If you can't read the room, every teachable moment will fly right past you and every opportunity will be lost. 

And you have to be in charge, but not a tyrant. You have to maintain the safe learning space, which means all those people skills have to be harnessed in service of balancing all the needs in front of you.

Yes, there are plenty of pieces of conventional wisdom that dance around this issue.

"I want them to love learning." And that's absolutely the important goal, and you can only achieve it if you know something to teach them and are able to do so. 

"We teach students, not subjects." Sure. What do you teach them. I get the point of this one, that we should not get so caught up in our material that we get things backward and think that the students are there to serve the content instead of vice versa. But we still have to teach the students something.

"Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage." Honestly, I don't know a teacher who still sticks closely to the sage model and just stands up there bloviating away the days, but it would be a lousy model to follow. But it's a serious mistake to over-correct into the 

"We're all just here to learn together and I'm just one more learner and they teach me as much as I teach them." If you don't know more about what you're teaching than your students do, just go home. You are the grown up adult specialist. That is the gig. If you don't know more than the students, if you are not the expert guide on the learning journey, then what exactly are the taxpayers paying you for? Your heart can be as big as all outdoors, but your brain needs to be full, too. 

(Also, if you're going to tell me that nobody needs to know anything because Google exists, just go far away.)

None of this means you have to be an all-knowing teacherbot who is the supreme authority on all matters, just standing in the classroom spewing forth your infallible wisdom. 

All of this is a lot of work, and constant work because teaching is about balancing a whole bunch of things and the eight is always shifting so you can never ever get into a stance and think, "Well, I can just lock this down exactly here." 

Which means on top of all the rest, you have to want to do the job. You have to want to succeed, to do everything that's called for. You have to want to teach, not just grab a paycheck or add a line on your resume. You have to give a shit. You have to care.

So I'm torn, because in my mind, almost everything on the list rests on knowing your content. Except the desire to do the job. But of the two, content knowledge is the element that can be learned. I don't know how to teach you to give a shit about teaching, but I know lots of ways for you to learn the content so that you can do the job. 

So I think I have to put knowledge of subject matter at #2, right behind "Want to do the job." Which is why I suspect the Ohio idea won't help much, just like most of these bar-lowering warm-body-recruiting ideas aren't helping all that much. It's easy to find people with college degrees and warm bodies, but the people who want to teach and really care about the work are already there. If you are a policy maker (or newspaper publisher) who imagines that there are millions of folks just dying to teach and the only thing holding them back is some paperwork, then you have some subject matter knowledge problems of your own. 

The Heritage Wish List for the 118th Congress

The right wing Heritage Foundation has an education wish list for the next session of Congress.

And who can blame them? Their last wish list was a list of right wing judges they hoped to have installed, and Trump was their big ole Santa Claus.

But this is a list we should pay attention to, because it's what the next Congress is going to get lobbied hard for. So let's see what these folks want to find under their tree next year.

Early childhood education and care

I actually don't entirely disagree with their very first item, which is a safe harbor for household employee child care. Currently, if you are spending more than $2,400 for a sitter/nanny in your home, you are required to do all those employer things like withholding taxes and submitting quarterly payments to the IRS and I know rich folks who have inhouse nannies could just suck it up, but I know a few not-rich people for whom this stuff is a real issue. Of course, there's also the supreme hassle of being a gig worker with a stack of 1099s at tax time. There has to be a better way, but it needs to be one that protects the rights and livelihood of the workers on this low end of the scale.

Next, Heritage wants to burn down Head Start, and "although the federal government should not be involved in the provision of early childhood education and care in the first place," Heritage would settle for folding Head Start money into the Child Care Development Fund, which is a childcare voucher program for the littles that hands over some money and lets parents pick the provider.

Remember the 529 savings programs that let parents "invest" money for college funds. Back in 2017, Congress expanded the program so that it can now be used to pay for K-12 expenses like private school tuition. Heritage would like to keep right on expanding and letting folks use the 529s for preschool and child care. Folks on the right like 529 plans because they set up all the structure needed for a voucher program.  

Elementary and Secondary Education

Two goals focus on the DC school system. Heritage would like Congress to expand eligibility for the DC voucher program. They would also like DC schools to become a "model for the rest of the nation" by instituting a gag law, "rejecting the application of 'critical race theory' and 'queer theory' to school lessons and activities." They're using the argument that things like requiring an appropriate pronoun would constitute "compelled speech." That argument also extends to having educators "acting in a way that violates objective biological facts and, potentially, their personal beliefs and values." So, compelled speech is bad, but compelled silence is appropriate.

Heritage would like a national "Parent's Bill of Rights," though not one that expands the federal government's "footprint in state and local education policy." Just something nice a vague that "concisely confirms that a parent is a child’s primary caregiver." Well, that and "provisions about parents’ right to direct the upbringing, education, and religious and moral instruction for their children."

And in the continuing attempt to get voucher feet in the door, Heritage would like Congress to make IDEA and Title I funds "portable," as vouchers for things like micro-education savings accounts. While we're at it, says Heritage, lets also institute federal vouchers (education savings account style) for military families and students on tribal lands. 

Higher Education

Put a stop to all that student loan forgiveness stuff, including the Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which is a bad program because it "prioritizes government work over private-sector employment." 

Also, Congress should get busy phasing out federal student loan programs entirely "to make space for a restoration of the private lending market."

Also, let's put a stop to the current accreditation system for higher ed and replace it with accreditation by whoever the state feels like offering sponsorship to. There's already a bill for this--the 2019 Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act , sponsored by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Heritage quotes him:

Imagine having access to credit and student aid and for a program in computer science accredited by Apple or in music accredited by the New York Philharmonic; college-level history classes on-site at Mount Vernon or Gettysburg; medical-technician training developed by the Mayo Clinic; taking massive, open, online courses offered by the best teachers in the world from your living room or the public library.

Yes, that would be paradise for privateers. For ordinary students, not so much.

Heritage has a beef with research funding, arguing "that taxpayers end up cross-subsidizing the research agendas of woke billionaire philanthropists, but universities use this indirect cost windfall to fund growth in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) staff, country club–like campuses, and administrative systems of questionable value." That's an odd argument, as at least one university I'm familiar with does that kind of over-expansion because some corporation or regular unwoke millionaire wants their name on a new building. 

And Heritage would like higher ed to have "skin in the game" by carrying some of the cost of unpaid student loans. 

So there you have it.

When Congress gets back to work, look for these choice ideas to crop up, as Heritage continues its tradition at whittling away at any kind of taxpayer-funded services for other people in hopes that someday there will be nothing left but a sliver that rich folks can use to pick at their own teeth. Here's hoping Santa decides they've been very naughty.

It's The Poverty, Stupid

As the discussion of Learning Loss drags on, with a big side of Blame It On The School Buildings Closures (itself with a big side of And It's All The Teachers' Fault), guess what we're not discussing.

Poverty and its relationship to student achievement.

If you're a regular, you know that I think most of what is being said about Learning Loss is bunk, an attempt to focus entirely too much attention on Big Standardized Test scores.

But if you're really concerned about this stuff, by any measure (and there's no question that the usual level of education didn't happen in the depths of the pandemess), then you have to pay attention to one particular factor. 

The New York Times threw its hat into the Let's Explain This ring, and while they buy that remote learning may take some of the blame, it's not the major factor. 

So remote learning does not explain the whole story. What else does? In a sophisticated analysis of thousands of public school districts in 29 states, researchers at Harvard and Stanford Universities found that poverty played an even bigger role in academic declines during the pandemic.

“The poverty rate is very predictive of how much you lost,” Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford who helped lead the analysis, told me.

This comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody who has been paying attention, because poverty level has always been predictive of scores on the BS Test (and to be clear, when we talk about "how much you lost," we're just talking about how much your BS Test score dropped). Always. 

And after decades, we still don't know a sure-fire way to get poor kids scores up other than subject them to intense test prep at the expense of the rest of the full education that rich kids get--a deeply misguided and unfortunate effect of making the BS Test scores the be-all and end-all of schooling. And under political leaders of all persuasion, we have repeatedly doubled down on that on the theory that raising test scores would lift people out of poverty, even bring an end to poverty itself, an idea that belongs on the shelf somewhere between trickle-down economics and unicorn farming.

We actually know a good means of reducing child poverty in the US. We just reduced child poverty to record low levels in 2021 by way of expanding the child tax credit plus some other poverty mitigation measures during COVID, but we had to knock that stuff off, because our urge to make the lives of children better invariably takes a back seat to our other societal urges, like the one that says the poors should have to suffer the results of whatever bad choices or moral failings made them deserve to be poor in the first place. 

So we're going to freak out loudly over the Learning Loss stuff, because there is money to be made in combatting the dreaded BS Test score drop. But to address the major underlying issue of poverty, we'll probably do nothing much. I can predict this based on the fact that poverty levels have been an issue in education for forever, and yet we get these kinds of solutions.

No Child Left Behind: You lazy teachers are just using child poverty as an excuse for not doing your jobs.

Charter school choice: We will "save" a tiny percentage of the poors, but only the ones we want, and maybe it will turn out that we don't actually know how to save them.

Testocrats: If they get high scores on the Big Standardized Test, they will stop being poor.

Teach for America: The poors just need some super-smart future ivy league grads to come teach them for a couple of years.

Race to the Top: See "No Child Left Behind"

Vouchers: This system in which they get a few thousand to spend as they wish won't make them less poor, and they still won't be able to get into great private schools, but at least their struggles will be their own problem instead of society's.

Never mind discussing solutions such as a living minimum wage so that working poor can be less poor. Universal health care. Or directing more necessary resources to schools serving poor families. And definitely not going to talk about ending the US standing as the only major nation in the world with no parental leave at all, because families are important and babies need nurturing, but not at any cost to employers. 

Yes, as we sift through the pandemic data and focus all our attention on the debate about keeping buildings open or not, it will become increasingly clear that A) poverty creates a major hurdle for educational attainment and B) policy makers and thought leaders would much rather talk about something else. 

ICYMI: Venison On The Hoof Edition (11/27)

Where you are, this is probably just more of Thanksgiving Weekend aka Get Out There And Spend Money time, but here in NW PA it is time to go shoot some deer. (which is why schools are closed tomorrow). And while I am usually Switzerland on the whole deer vs. hunters issue, this fall I have seen so many deer try to throw themselves into the path of my car that I am rooting heavily for the hunters. You may think of deer as beautiful slices of nature, but if you lived cheek by fluffy jowl with them, you would understand that they are just large, dumb, graceful rats.

Here's some reading for while you're at home resting up. 

Florida’s 2023 Legislative Session: What’s Scheduled and What to Expect

Accountabaloney has a rundown of schedule and proud announcements about intentions. It isn't going to be pretty.

Star-Spangled Bans: No place for Pride in some schools after anti-LGBTQ laws spread

From K-12 Dive, a pretty thorough summation, including some historical perspective. A good reader on the mess that has been created.

SC: Moms for Liberty School Board Fires Superintendent, Opens Itself to Litigation

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider is wondering if that South Carolina school board that came out guns a'blazin' hasn't set itself up for some legal problems.

The War On Teachers Part One: It's the money, Stupid - Salary Edition

Jeff Waid takes a look at the ways in which teachers are being hammered via their pay.

Human Capital Roundtable member privately blasted NC teacher merit pay plan as “undercooked goulash”

Justin Parmenter continues to follow the ins and outs of an attempt to degrade the pay and profession of teachers in North Carolina.

The Southern Strategy (Part II)

On his substack, Steve Nuzum continues to draw parallels between the CRT panic and the Southern Strategy of the Nixon era as ways to harvest white resentment. Plus he gets in a fight with a legislator on Twitter.

School segregation persists in the new New Orleans, study says

A new study finds one more thing that charterization didn't fix in New Orleans. From Nola.com

Teaching Human History

Nobody connects the personal, the professional, and the politics like Nancy Flanagan. She reflects here on visits to Germany and Clint Smith's great piece about remembering ugly pasts.

LOL, We Already Knew It

At Gregory Sampson's school, someone dared to ask why they were giving so many redundant tests. The an administrator went and told the truth.

Trying to Convince Your Legislators Not to Expand Vouchers? Here Are Some Facts You Need

Jan Resseger collects some of the information on voucher programs and why your state shouldn't hop on that kind of bandwagon. Great for sharing.

What Do the Midterms Mean for Education?

Rick Hess at Ed Week in conversation with Andy Rotherham. Two guys you probably disagree with a lot, but an interesting and thoughtful conversation just the same.

The network behind the books pulled from Beaufort Co. schools, and the one fighting back

A close up look at one on the ground battle over books and the groups lined up on either side. From The Island Packet.

The Year We Banned Books

Texas Monthly takes a look at Texas's emergence as the #1 book banning state in the country.

Let's Ban a Book

Rick Doehring takes a satirical swipe at book banning by taking aim at Goodnight, Moon.

Over at Forbes, I looked at surprise team-up between the Gates Foundation and The Reason Foundation.

And you can still find me over at Substack--same content, but different digital pathway.

Do Education and Urgency Mix?

Is urgency a critical element of education?

Rachel Skerrit, writing for Education Next about the experience of leading Boston Latin School, thinks so. She puts "culture of urgency" top of the list of critical elements. What does she mean?

What I mean by “culture of urgency” is to unite all constituents around a mission and to be clear about where we currently fall short. Urgency does not mean to place so much pressure on teachers and staff that their longevity in the profession is unlikely.

She argues that urgency in urban education "is created from an incident." Something happens, and leaders respond to an urgent need the incident revealed. 

Her piece sparked a response from Martin West (Harvard Graduate School of Education), and as I would expect, the guy who suggests that students should get "caught up" by spending more time in school, he agrees that urgency is key. There's a whole side argument about whether or not urgency is racist, as some report they have been told, and I'm inclined to agree that it's not, with the usual caveat that as an old white guy, I may be missing something.

Urgency has also been brought up in various discussions of "catching up" after the pandemic pause, and in all this discussion, there are some shades of meaning that matter. 

Some folks seem to be using urgency to mean "treat this like it is an important thing," which is just another way to set things as priorities, and that's fine. Where I start casting side eye is when urgency is used to mean "You have to do something RIGHT NOW!"

This is salesman urgency, the whole pitch of "you'd better lay your money down right now for this fabulous deal because if you hesitate it will be gone." This is the urgency that's applied to make sure we skip any kind of meaningful thought, discussion, or reflection.

Martin quotes writer Tema Okun: When a sense of urgency “makes it difficult to take time to be inclusive [and] encourage democratic and/or thoughtful decision-making,” it can be oppressive. When a sense of urgency produces “unrealistic expectations about how much can get done in any period of time,” it can become self-defeating.

You may remember back to the days when Common Core was being rammed down everyone's throats, and the argument to many objections was that we can't possibly roll this out slowly or carefully because the schools are burning and we have to fix it all RIGHT NOW! Likewise, school choice advocates have argued that their policies must be implemented RIGHT NOW because students can't wait another minute. While some folks making the urgency argument may have been sincere, there were certainly many who were simply trying to force the sale and get things moving before anyone could think much about it. 

It is a match with the Silicon Valey ethic of move fast and break things. And unfortunately it can trickle down to the classroom as well.

The Big Standardized Test (and many other tests as well) harness RIGHT NOW urgency, insisting that students not take time to reflect or consider answers, but crank them out RIGHT NOW before the buzzer sounds. It's a particularly odious approach to writing on tests; I wonder how many scholars who created their masterworks over a period of years would flunk a test requiring them to crank out insights in essay form in the next thirty minutes.

And it's easy to let urgency work an unhealthy path into the classroom. Lord, but I know this one. I always felt that 180-day limit breathing down my neck as I contemplated everything I wanted to get done. It was a regular part of my professional self-care to stop, take a deep breath, and just take my foot off the gas pedal before I drove my class right into a wall. RIGHT NOW urgency is the enemy of careful, thoughtful reflection, and I had to regularly remind myself that that kind of meaningful depth was more important that getting to everything on my list. 

RIGHT NOW urgency is the enemy of quality. Let me tell a professional development story. The session leader had us divide ourselves into groups based on decision-making style--whether we had to think it through first, or move quickly and ask questions later, or some other combinations. One relatively small group that resulted was the move fast and break things group; when asked what the advantage of their approach was, one participant said proudly, "We get shit done." In my group, the approach deliberately crowd, someone muttered in response, "Exactly. Shit. You get shit done." 

Currently folks want to apply RIGHT NOW urgency to Learning Loss. Specifically, they want to apply it to the matter of getting BS Test scores back up there, and in fact that is where West is going with his article--parents don't understand just how behind their kids are and we've got to convince them so they can panic properly and help us implement and pay for all these programs that will get student achievement test scores back up! Beware papers like this one, trying to make an academic case that we need to accelerate learning (somehow) and increase hours and push push push students to hammer every little iota of education out of every precious second, as if those seconds could not be used for other precious pursuits.

It may be a shortcoming that I am not a Get Shit Done kind of guy, but when the salesman starts trying to make me feel an urgent need to give him my money RIGHT NOW, what I actually feel is a certainty that it is time to walk away. Urgency is to often the enemy of sober thought about choosing the best path forward; in fact, it's often an attempt to short-circuit any meaningful discussion about what the path forward should be. 

Set priorities? Excellent idea. Treat important things as if they are important? A critical idea. Letting somebody stampede you by hollering RIGHT NOW before you've finished deciding right now what? A terrible idea. 

Wilson: Segregation and Religion and Race

Erika Wilson, scholar, law professor (and dabbler in that scary CRT stuff), has a new piece in the Yale Law Review. I've read Racialized Religious School Segregation so that you don't have to, but you ought to. Granted, it reads like the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the Yale Law Review, but that's what you get when you get a plate instead of a bowl of twinkies. There's a lot to chew on here, and I want to pull out some of the highlights.

Wilson is looking at school choice in the wake of Carson v. Makin, the case in which SCOTUS cemented the notion that states must include religious schools in any sort of voucher-ish program, even if those schools are discriminating in ways that no public school would never accept. Here's her main point.

The central claim of this Essay is that racial integration of public schools—though much maligned—is indispensable to moving America’s democracy away from its exclusionary origins and into a well-functioning, racially inclusive democracy. Choice in the private market exacerbates inherent and unresolvable tensions between school choice and racial integration. School choice generally operates against a backdrop of racial pluralism, racial subordination, and racial power imbalance that puts choice in tension with principles of equality, tolerance, and universal citizenship. Expanding school-choice options to include private religious schools is likely to exacerbate these tensions in ways that threaten the possibility of moving into a functioning multiracial democracy.

It occurs to me that in this context, the agitation against critical race theory makes another kind of sense (beyond eroding trust in public education) as a pre-emption against any arguments about choice-driven segregation ("That's just more of that CRT stuff").

The first section of the essay looks at the history of school segregation and the importance to democracy of integration efforts. It's the section that's going to make some people tetchy.

School integration undoubtedly requires Black and brown students to bear heavy costs. But given the realities of white supremacy, the costs of not pursuing integrated schools are even greater. Pursuing integration sets a path toward disrupting the racial subordination that is inherent to segregation in America. Because of America’s history of white supremacy, segregation in America makes material and social equality impossible.

Section II looks at how school choice has not helped, and digs down into the ways that school choice works counter to democracy itself. The market does not bend that way.

School choice is supposed to reform public education by creating a marketplace of schools and allowing families to shop for a school. But in doing so, it situates students as consumers rather than as citizens. It shifts the purpose of public education away from cultivating citizens for American democracy toward furnishing a marketplace through which individual consumers can gain economic, social, and political advantage. To the extent the school-choice model engages with democracy, it defines democracy through the lens of freedom, reasoning that democracy should afford citizens the freedom to choose schools free from state regulation. School choice furthers values like liberty, autonomy, privacy, and competition. In contrast, school integration furthers values like equality, tolerance, and citizenship training.

Emphasis mine. Wilson looks at three ways that the tension between these models causes issues. Let me pull those three points out.

First, under the school-choice model, parents are not required to consider how their choices impact the broader community. Parents instead select schools that fit their preferences, even if that preference is for a school that teaches discrimination, intolerance, or myopic American history.

Second, parents of different racial and socioeconomic groups use school choice differently. Parents select schools that reflect either their ability to exercise social privilege and power or the limits of the institutional context in which their choices are being made.

Finally, racialized power dynamics place true choice out of reach for marginalized Black and brown students.

Put another way, the fewer resources parents have, the fewer choices a school choice system offers them, and the more they make choices based on circumventing the barriers built into the system. 

Section III looks at the intersection between choice, religion and segregation. This, again, gets rather academic in language, but the idea is solid enough--that in the US, many religions "are not organized solely around a collection of spiritual beliefs; many are also organized around social and political viewpoints." 

We've seen a ton of this over the past decade. Obama isn't really an American, isn't really a Christian. Trump, somehow despite all evidence to the contrary, is an instrument of God/Jesus. What are the odds that this effect spills over into schools that select only "real Christians" for their student body?

Wilson discusses the old objections--public schools have a terrible track record on segregation, so what's wrong a choice school that also segregates Brown and Black students if it gives them a good education (answer: it probably doesn't).

Section IV (yes, this essay is not short) considers the struggle between racialized religious segregation and American democracy.

American democracy is under attack. Though the attacks are multifaceted, one of the largest threats is the rise of racial and religious balkanization. The Court’s decision in Carson may significantly exacerbate the balkanization. As Justice Breyer noted, allowing religion into the public-school system increases the risk of social strife and division. Proliferation of school choice that creates racialized religious segregation will result in students being siloed, unexposed to the diverse array of persons that inhabit America. The net result will be a decrease in social solidarity and cohesion, elevating risks of internal upheaval and violence. Violence resulting from the insurrection at the Capitol, attempts to prohibit teaching about the history of race and discrimination in America, and the protests over extrajudicial killings of Black people by the police epitomize the dangers of existing balkanization. The insurrection at the Capitol wherein the participants made explicit calls to Christian nationalism presages how adding religion to the layers of balkanization could endanger America’s democracy.

The opposite of the CATO Institue argument, which is that public school is a hotbed and argument and the only way to bring peace to the country is to let everyone retreat to their own educational silos where they don't have to get in fights with people who are different. Something that, as Wilson points out, we've been trying on an ad hoc basis and which is not working out particularly well.

Choice, she warns, also creates the growth of tiers of education,

Allowing school choice to be contoured by religion and race opens up the possibility for the dominant racialized religion to be used as a sorting metric that enhances the relative value of some students’ education while devaluing the education of others. Put another way, certain kinds of religious education could become sought-after status markers that are unavailable to those who are not part of the dominant race or religion.

There's a lot more to this piece, and you may not buy all of it, but it's still a thought-provoking work, worth a read. You can find the whole piece here. 

Gratitude

 Every year on this day, in my regular column in our local newspaper, I take a whack at the complicated feelings around Thanksgiving. This is from last year, and it's about as close as I've come to saying what I want to say. Happy Thanksgiving.

I have steadfastly avoided arguments about the historical basis of today’s holiday. No version of the first Thanksgiving is made better by the human impulse to flatten complicated human beings into two dimensional good guys and bad guys.

The Pilgrims appear to have been absolutely sincere in their faith, but with that comes an absolute certainty that they were right and everyone else was wrong. “Let’s establish a colony where everyone is free to worship as they wish,” said no Puritan ever. And the native tribes and bands that they encountered may have seemed more primitive than the European immigrants, but they had their own web of complicated and occasionally nasty political wranglings in which the Pilgrims represented a whole new factor.

Our colonial history is a complicated, messy tangle, worthy of careful inspection and thought. Kind of like all the rest of our history. But history is an endless conversation, not a single story set in stone, which means that history-based holidays are always going to be problematic.

But Thanksgiving isn’t just about history. It’s about gratitude, which absolutely deserves at least one holiday, because gratitude is everything.

We Americans aren’t very good at being grateful. We’re like the idea of being self-made, of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, of doing the work to be deserving of rewards. This often leads us into a strange sort of pseudo-gratitude—“Thank you, God, for giving me the things that I have earned and so richly deserved.”

That’s not really thankfulness. The Puritans themselves had a counter-argument—in their view of God and humanity, the only thing that human beings actually deserve is to burn in Hell forever, so anything else was a gift from God, something that you did not deserve but which God gave as a gift. In the Puritan view of the world, you could never, ever stand before God and say any version of “I earned this. I deserve this. So you must give it to me.”

We play the cards we are dealt in life, and we alone are responsible for what we do with them, how we play them, how we make the best use of them. But we don’t pick them ourselves. We do not make ourselves. And we don’t do anything alone.

It can be discouraging to take a hard look at our favorite self-made success stories, because they are all fables. Our favorite billionaires got started with family money or government money or important connections that gave them a leg up. I can’t think of a single success story, big or small, that doesn’t depend on the assistance of others. At the very very minimum, modern success stories depend on a basis in a stable nation with stable currency and a functioning infrastructure.

There’s nothing wrong with getting assistance from people, circumstances, luck, grace. We are still responsible for what we do with all of that. Nobody is a success based on only their own personal effort and work, but nobody is a success without putting effort and work into it.

But to deny the importance of the assistance we get, the crises we didn’t have to navigate, the breaks that were handed to us—well, that’s when we forget to be thankful. And gratitude is everything.

Without gratitude, we become hardened and unkind. From believing that we did it all ourselves, it’s an easy step to thinking that anyone who doesn’t have what we have—well, that person must be lazier or dumber or just generally less deserving than we are. Thankfulness naturally leads to a desire to pay it forward; the lack of gratitude leads to saying, “Not my problem. They need to take care of themselves.”

When we think all our success is self-created, we start to take it as proof that we are better than those who don’t have what we have. Thankfulness leads to empathy, to the ability to say (and mean) “There but for the grace of God go I.” Lack of gratitude leads to thinking, “I would never, ever be in that position. I’m just too smart and good. Those people must deserve their misfortune because they are lazy or bad.” Ingratitude concludes that you have been paid what the world owes you. Gratitude realizes what you owe the world.

So the challenge today is to think about what you’re truly thankful for. What do you have that is a gift of other people, God, fate, the universe? What in your life is more than you deserve? What do you have to be truly thankful for?