We need to ask the hard questions

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.


~ Fredrick Douglass


I read a story, in a magazine; years ago of a woman who cut the ends off of the store bought hams before she cooked them. One Christmas her son asked her, “Why do you cut off the ends of the ham? His mother replied, “That is the way your grandmother did it when I was growing up, that’s how we always have done it.” At dinner that night the son asked his grandmother the same question. The grandmother’s reply was, “Well when I was first married the only pan we could afford was too small for the whole ham, so I had to cut the ends off to make it fit.” The mother of the little boy laughed and said that she had no idea. The mother of the son never bothered to ask her mother why she cut the ends off the ends of the ham when she cooked them and she never thought there might be a better way. She saw how it was done and never considered asking why.

To be and independent teacher you must begin to look at what is being done and ask, Why we doing this? Could it be done better? Just because it works, just because that's how we've always done it, doesn't mean it's the way it should still be done? Can we make it better? Is what we are considering doing going to make a real difference? Is it going to change lives? Is it going to inspire our teachers and students to become the people they have always dreamed of and are destined to be? Are we content to do things that make us feel good because we are busy doing stuff so we can say, “Hey look we are busy… busy aren't we great?"

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and the depth of our answers.”


~ Carl Sagan

Shawn