Persevere.

This week my students are full-swing into Presentation of Learning mode -- which means that daily, I wake up and pray that I will have enough mindfulness to be present with each one of them as they present 5-8 minute speeches regarding their learning over the first semester.

Today twenty students presented, and yesterday, twenty-two.

This is always an important time of the year for the students as they reflect on their growth and project onto their future.

It reminds me of a quotation by John Dewey from Democracy and Education when he writes:

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication, and hence all genuine social life, is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meanings. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All communication is like art.