Empathy, Impact & Perspective
A couple of years ago, we revised the curriculum in our principalship program . One of our many goals was to get our future leaders out of their comfort zones and broaden their perspective around issues like culture and poverty. We know many school people are "good at" school because it is a middle class endeavor. Among other things, requiring field-based internship experiences in a non-profit/social service setting seemed like a good way to begin broadening our future leaders' experiences. Yesterday I read a reflection written by an excellent student, Tracy Kelly, an elementary teacher from Woodbine , IA who had completed her non-profit internship experience at a food bank. She described how, the evening before, the furnace in their house had gone on the fritz and she had recently hit a deer (on the way home from class, of course). These frustrations added to the every day stress of a teacher, wife and mother. She described a couple of teenage boys who seemed a litt