“That best portion of a good man's life — his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”
— William Wordsworth
"Non possiamo fare cose grandi, solo piccole cose con grande amore."
— Mother Teresa
“What you do matters, brother, all of it.”
— Raymond Carver
“You don’t have to keep looking,” I told him, “it’s not that big of a deal!” But keep looking he did until, several moments later, he emerged triumphant from under the big wooden desk in the corner of my now-empty classroom, my errant earring in hand.
“Here you go,” he said, with amusement and quiet dignity.
This was the autumn of my third year of teaching. Future-West Point graduate and current combat battalion commander Bill Parsons was the eighth grade earring rescuer: common goodness was the lesson.
This past October in Assembly, our upper schoolers offered up a thunderous applause after watching Kyle Adamson’s five-minute digital backpack journal chronicaling his younger brother Blake’s victorious struggle against cancer. A few days later, my colleague Brian Coco helped 300 juniors and seniors (and all of their adult advisors) understand why making headbands and modified singlets out of the donated homecoming T-shirts was not a good thing. Last spring, three of my juniors spent upwards of 15 minutes spontaneously cleaning up the gooey orange mess oozing onto one of my lower bookshelves from a few forgotten pumpkins.
While such moments rarely make school news, and even more rarely capture media attention, they help us and our kids practice being good. Just as playing scales trains the embouchure and running wind sprints trains the quads, holding the door for a classmate on crutches or stopping to admire a first-grader’s painting or leaving class to go cheer up a friend who has just burst into tears trains the heart.
Several years ago, when Wyatt was a student in my sophomore English class, he floored me one afternoon with the simple grace of his momentary goodness. Students were choosing partners for a photostory project, and with acute sensitivity but zero fanfare, Wyatt looked up and invited the least popular and most academically challenged student in the class to be his partner.
I still have the photo of Brian, another former sophomore, holding a first-grader in his arms as they both wove a prayer wheel. Julie’s willingness to be tardy to physics class in order to finish peer editing Jimmy’s grammatically tangled essay, my colleague David’s evening call to my home last fall to find out if my chronic ear infection had cleared, Caroline’s unbelievably cheerful notes to everyone in our advisory — all of these moments, stacked on top of each other, become contagious. Goodness, when shared by adults and children in community each day, becomes the social norm.
Last November, I spent a memorable weekend at Hathaway Brown’s Education Innovation Summit in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Common goodness, especially as practiced programmatically by schools in partnership with local communities, was one of the major sub-themes of the entire conference. I learned about exciting programs happening around the country and realized that independent schools, once nearly adolescent in their insularity and self-absorption, are finally maturing, are finally realizing that, as community activist Bill Strickland put it, “all children are our children.” Still, my best lessons in goodness during that weekend emerged in the small, human moments: when 10th-grader Ingrid thanked me for smiling at her during her captivating tour of the HB campus; when a presenter handed me his own marked-up pages when I asked him where I could find the information cited in his remarks, and (most notably) when I stopped by nearby Hawken School’s middle school for an impromptu visit.
For two years in the late 1990s, just before taking a four-year leave to raise my infant and toddler sons, I taught English at Hawken. As part of the eighth grade team, I worked closely with my colleagues and came to know them well, but because we moved to another part of the city and then to another state after I left Hawken, I hadn’t seen any of them for 11 years. When I showed up unannounced at 3:30 pm on the Thursday of the conference, the first colleague I ran into was Peter Thomas, a veteran eighth grade science teacher, who dropped whatever he had been working on in his classroom and offered me his full attention for more than 30 minutes. Peter gave me a tour of the new facilities, he filled me in on school news, he told me about his recent trips to Alaska with students and colleagues, he asked all about my family and career.
When we found Jim Scully, a seventh grade history teacher, who left his in-session basketball practice to come give me a hug and a gleeful greeting (“Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?!”), I knew that these moments were important. Peter walked me out to the parking lot, urged me to keep in touch, mentioned that he’d contact Team Donovan if he ever came to St. Louis, and, in general, made me feel remembered and valued: in the middle of an ordinary day in my relatively ordinary teaching career, I had come into full contact with common goodness.
In February, 36 sophomores and juniors and I embarked on a 12-week literature course called “The Good Life.” The central question of this course? What it really means to live a good life. We are studying Great Expectations and Ecclesiastes, The Old Man and the Sea and Studs Terkel’s American Dreams: Lost and Found, Donald Hall’s Life Work and several versions of the King Midas tale, but we are also paying attention to what all good courses, all good teachers, and all good schools pay attention to all the time: how we can weave common acts of goodness into everything we do, every single day.