THESE THINGS ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE THEY ARE USEFUL. WE DO NOT ADMIRE WHAT WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one  discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become  unintelligible,  the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician-- nor is it valid to discriminate against 'business documents and school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be 'literalists of  the imagination'--above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.  -- by Marianne Moore

YOU CAN NOT TALK AND REALLY HEAR THE MUSIC.

Meet Akram Sebakijje. He is 10 years old

and lives with his mother, 2 brothers, and 4 sisters.

He wants to be a teacher when he grows up. 

Meet Alice Nabakabya. She is 8 years old
and lives with her father, 4 brothers, and sister.
She wants to be a pilot when she grows up. 

Dr. Alexander and I met today for my practicum project advising session.  What can I say about such a positive experience?  "Soft guidance," the feeling of a steamy rain (one of my favorite things, as you know), comes to mind.  I was worried that wanting to carry my Practicum into my experience in Uganda in March would be met with the kind of stern resistance that my family had displayed when the subject first came up.  However, I had forgotten that Dr. Alexander's first teaching post was on a Navajo Reservation.  She listened intently, leaning forward in her chair, receptive to every word, giving feedback, and offering suggestions for enhancing my ideas; however, she did not confine them.  

The only pointed advice for my interaction with other teachers while in Bugabo, Uganda (the village where I hope to train teachers in the future) that she gave was this, "Talk less.  Listen more."  It made more sense than anything anyone has told me thus far.  I hope that in doing so I can create the kind of symphony of friends and colleagues that will make lovely music, blending from the diverse and unimaginable sounds of Africa and the cacophony of American discography that breathes inside this skin.  "Talk less.  Listen more."  Then, you will hear the music.