| Dear friends, Welcome to a new school year! I hope this message finds you well and refreshed as we embark on another wild ride with kids, colleagues and families. Over the summer, I thought a lot about this newsletter. I was wondering how best to continue when the idea to not continue arrived with surprising clarity and resonance. This is the final edition of Bending The Arc and while bittersweet, I’m proud of the connections we’ve been able to make over the last 7(!) years of this publication. Thank you for being a part of this attempt to better understand our world and our work. It feels like there’s no good way to close this chapter of my writing journey but I would like to offer a few thoughts about what I’ve gleaned from the experience and my hopes for the future. |
Lessons from the archive
Curation is a skill that can and should be cultivated.
The joy of compiling this newsletter has been in the gathering, sorting and selection of resources and opportunities I personally found compelling, provocative, and/or under-recognized. I suspect other people would make different choices and that’s the beauty of the endeavor!
We all curate information and entertainment; books, art, friends, and learning. How we share our choices and enthusiasms with those around us matters. We don’t need a large digital platform to do it. Book and movie recs shared over dinner, PD opportunities circulated among colleagues, articles passed along via WhatsApp or IG – these are all opportunities to build our communities of knowledge and interests. The more intentional we are, the greater the likelihood that these connections will encourage us to take action in some form.
Widening our perspective of what we consider a “resource” for our teaching, or the classroom, or other roles, builds our capacity for managing change.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have grown significantly as a reader, writer and thinker in the last decade. In response to numerous crises that have unfolded before our very eyes including a global pandemic, intensifying climate disaster, warmongering superpowers, an accelerated genocide, and resource plundering by the billionaire class, I found it impossible to restrict the scope of my offerings to pedagogical websites and discretely packaged information. Thus, my ask of you as readers was to explore with me bigger topics such as capitalism and labor, water scarcity and political power structures, marketing hype versus the real risks and detriments of an expanding AI-fueled economic bubble. I’m not sure how successful I was in these attempts but it would have felt unethical not to push us all to delve more deeply into the contexts that shape our realities and those of our students.
The internet is the opposite of forever.
Through several years worth of public online writing, I have come to understand and make peace with the ephemeral nature of digital output. Platforms go out of business, websites disappear, links die. There is no imperative for any of this to remain or be kept.
The internet is useful and powerful while also fleeting and transitory. The dominant business models aim to keep us chasing whatever it is we might be seeking. User satisfaction presents a far lower priority for our tech overlords than relentless data capture and platform dependencies.
While I hope to keep this archive available for the next few years, many of the links in previous editions are no longer active. Even so, the writing speaks to the given moment and may offer reminders of how we faced certain challenges. I hope we can take heart in the strides we made along the way..
Gratitude and Joy
Before I check out entirely, however, I want to share a few sources of joy and interest that may also strike your fancy.
No surprise, I subscribe to more newsletters than I can reliably digest. That said, there are a few that I consistently read and learn from:
- Culture Study by Anne Helen Petersen,
- The Audacity by Roxane Gay,
- Trespassing by Antonia Malchik,
- The Meteor,
- Hammer and Hope,
- Organizing My Thoughts by Kelly Hayes,
- Second Breakfast by Audrey Watters and
- Teen Health Today by Christopher Pepper.
Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jamelle Bouie are by now the only reasons I tune into the New York Times anymore. Both are active on social media, if you care to keep up with their incisive hot takes without engaging their primary employer.
Podcasts are not yet fully my jam but I have been pleasantly surprised by
- 99% Invisible,
- Between The Covers, literary deep dives with David Naimon,
- and still a fixture in my rotation: Vibe Check with Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones.
Although inherently impermanent, these are some of the online sources that fill my cup, deepen my thinking and reaffirm my desire to be active in the world.
Thank you for being readers, supporters and friends of this passion project. I am a better educator, colleague, and learner thanks to your encouragement and interest. My wish is for us to continue to share our findings with each other as we pursue social justice at every imaginable level. Let’s keep growing with each other, pooling our capacities and staying open to new insights.
While I will miss the regular engagement with you through this channel, I’m looking forward to more direct community involvement with local dance and writing initiatives. It seems I am in the gradual process of reclaiming my time from the internet. Stepping back from social media and regular public writing feels radical, possibly irresponsible, in a time of right-wing political consolidation. Nevertheless, I want to place more faith in our collective and individual imaginations to dream bigger and better for our futures and that of this singular planet.
I believe in us.
In love and gratitude,
Sherri
(I’ll be dancing!)
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