Hope in verse.

As I was struggling with what to write about this week, I decided to come back to some notes I’d made from Dr. Roset’s dissertation. Instead of just copying them in here verbatim, I decided to reframe them as verse, and the occasional sets of haiku lol. So kinda like a found poem, none of these words are my own…none…but they are some hopeful words as we head into another week! (Page numbers and other authors referenced!)
 
Children tend to come to school hopeful,
with conceptions and ideas that are
personally meaningful and
significant to them.
 
However
 
the child does not expect
that most of what goes on in
his
her
head
and life
(thoughts and feelings and
questions and hopes and
desires and fears)
will have to remain
- PRIVATE -
- off limits -
in the social world of the
classroom.
 (Roset 246)
 

The prescription for
a dull, uninteresting
and boring classroom
 
for both students and
teachers is to start where you
want to start, pour in
 
what you want the child
to learn, pace that instruction
according to a
 
curriculum pre-
determined and the pressure of
the school calendar
 
and then ignore the
inevitable and brute
fact of our students’
 
I N D I V I D U A L I T Y.
 (Sarason 253)
 
 
If the conditions
that make for productive growth
and learning do not
 
exist for teachers,
teachers will be unable
to help to create
 
and sustain those same
conditions for their students.
Because when the juice
 
stops flowing for the
teachers, the juice will not flow
in students either.
 (Sarason 244)
 
 
Hope is the
          precursor of action
because hope
          frames possibility
in the move toward the
         realization of desires
and needs.
Hope is the
         precondition for action.
 (Roset 129)
 
 
Hope is not itself a force,
power,
or energy,
or emotion.
But it is a condition,
existing in varying degree
in
all
of
us
that may       SPARK
purposeful action
and behavior
---> toward goals.
Hope does vary
in the sense that it may be
high
         or low.
Active
             or passive.
Coerced from outside oneself
or initiated from one’s own
interior self.
It may be
escapist
or
generative.
Hope grids action.
It is not
action itself.
 (Carter 127)
 

Optimism and hope,
like helplessness and despair,
can be learned.
 The individual who hopes has
a worldview that looks beyond
the present situation and
conceptualizes
or believes
there is a way out to a more
promising future.
(Roset 145)
 

The feeling
of trust:
the feeling
that when you
articulate
what is in your
head,
it will be
responded to
with
respect,
 it will not
be perceived
as an
annoyance
or an
interference.
 (Sarason 252)
 

We cannot achieve
COMMUNITY
                       unless we
commit ourselves to the
principle:
love thy neighbor as thyself.
Yes,
these are sacred words,
but then again,
COMMUNITY is a
sacred idea.
 (Roset 282)
​

Development of hope
is a process
and stands as the most
fundamental prerequisite
for life,
and growth.
 
Life without hope
carries more trauma
than the human spirit
can bear.

To hope
is an essential condition
for being human.
(Roset 2)