Over the recent holiday break, I took advantage of a free afternoon to organize my bookshelf. A friend who had read my blog post about my not fitting the ideal teacher personality thought that it might be fun to gift me with an electronic labeler.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, suggests that our public schools would benefit from a spirit of innovation rather than one of regimentation.

The following quote is one of the first things my eighth-grade students see when they walk into their classroom in September:

A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting on the stage at our school's eighth-grade graduation ceremony. I was reflecting on the two years I have had with these students, and how we set out together to do something different with our time in this place we call school.

As our two-year arts@newman pilot program comes to a close (read more about it), we are entering the process of evaluating and reporting on our efforts, posing questions for future growth, and reflecting on the incredible journey we have undertaken.

I discovered something rather important this week: I'm in the wrong job! That's right -- for the past 25 years, I have lived under the false assumption that being a teacher was the ideal career for me.

Perhaps it's the result of having just turned fifty. It may be owing to the fact that I am a fairly new dad. Whatever the reason, the textual world our young people occupy today seems to be much more complex and more highly constructed than when I was entering my own teenage years.

I'm certainly not the first to observe that the term literacy has new meaning for our students -- a meaning that calls both educators and parents to carefully consider all the places where our children need help "reading and writing the world."

This is the second part of a two-part entry. Read part one.

The school year doesn't officially begin for another twelve hours, but already, a couple of things about our plan to introduce students to an interdisciplinary program have made themselves quite clear.

"The highly structured school with its fixed timetable, isolated subject areas, centralized curriculum, and authoritarian nature is giving way to a new order that places less stress on mechanical rote learning and greater importance on the discovery and exploration of concepts and impressions."

The theme for this first year of our arts@newman program could best be expressed with the statement "We live storied lives." Throughout the year, we have been exploring how the arts can help us both understand our stories more deeply and express those stories to others.