The Obama Family in Bar Harbor

Posted on July 30, 2010 by zoeweil

In a previous blog post I wrote about spending my birthday hiking 13 miles over 9 peaks in Acadia National Park. What I didn’t mention was that we had heard that the Obamas, scheduled to be in Acadia the weekend of July 16th, had actually come several days earlier and were already in the park. Since we were spending the day climbing most of the mountains in Acadia, we thought there actually might be a chance we’d run into them. We joked all day about it, calling “Barack! Barack! Where are you?” and asking people we met on the trails if they’d seen the Obamas yet.

My husband even made up a riddle that went like this: “Zoe, if you were rock climbing a really hard 5.12a route on Otter Cliffs (at the ocean) and you were at a particularly difficult spot in the climb and Barack Obama happened to sail by just at the moment, what would the person belaying you say?”

The answer was: “Zoe! You’re caught between Barack and a hard place!”

By the end of the day when we were exhausted and hadn’t run into the Obamas, my husband pointed out it was a “Barack O’bummer.”

Ah well. Turned out the Obamas had not come early and were still scheduled to arrive over the weekend.

So then on Friday, July 16, I was heading to the Bar Harbor airport to fly to Washington, DC, where I would be receiving an award inducting me into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame and giving a humane education workshop, and as I approached, the airport traffic was at a standstill. I knew immediately what was happening. The Obamas were arriving! Now, however, I was freaking out because I was not allowed to get into the airport. The police and US Air would give me no information, and I knew I had a connecting flight in Boston to catch. Now the Obamas were cramping my style and I was none too happy about it.

How fickle!

I pulled over and waited as the Obamas were whisked out of the airport and I was finally allowed to enter. I watched Air Force 1 fly off and all proceeded as planned. Thank goodness. So I’m trading locales with the Obamas this weekend. I hope they enjoy their time in beautiful Maine where they’ll probably appreciate the 80 degree weather while I melt in the 97 degrees in DC. Since I made my flight after all, I’m free to feel benevolent about their visit once again.

Cheers,

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm

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Thank You, Khalif Williams!

Posted on July 28, 2010 by zoeweil

For 8 1/2 years, the Institute for Humane Education (IHE), the organization I co-founded in 1996, has been blessed by Khalif Williams. He joined our organization as an office manager and development director in 2002, and two years later became our executive director. Khalif has not only been a tremendous asset to our organization and a humane education leader, but also my dear friend.

Khalif is stepping down as executive director to become the interim director at the Bay School – a school you may be familiar with if you read my blog regularly, because I’ve taught week-long humane education blocks to the middle schoolers for the last several years and have written about my experiences with the wonderful kids there in my blog and in my book, Most Good, Least Harm. It’s a fabulous school, and Khalif will be a wonderful director. He has longed to work directly with kids in a school for some time, and so I’m very excited for him, even though we are so sad to see him leave his position at IHE. Fortunately, he will be joining our board of directors, so he will still remain in a leadership role here.

I wanted to write this tribute to Khalif publicly because I feel so grateful to have been his partner at IHE for all these years and to honor the great contribution he has made to the field of humane education by furthering this important work. Khalif has such extraordinary qualities, and I’ve been so lucky to work with him. He is kind and generous, direct and clear-headed, poetic and wise, and incredibly smart. He is an amazing father and husband and leader and friend. Thank you Khalif. I wish you great success at the Bay School!

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and The Power and Promise of Humane Education

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The Great Drama Unfolding Around Us: A Celebration of Different Ways of Learning

Posted on July 26, 2010 by zoeweil

After a day of meetings and before one more evening meeting, I scooted out after dinner to kayak at low tide. The sun was setting and the clouds were pink in the western sky. The loons were making their eerie calls. I slid my kayak into the ocean and slowly paddled, staring into the shallow water to watch the drama unfolding below me. Crabs were battling, frilly worms were swaying like anemones, fish were schooling around me, tiny sea stars were clinging to little rocks and giant sea stars to big ones. Seals were bobbing their heads to look at me as I looked at them, both of us curious.

What a world we live in! What mysteries unveil themselves when we choose to observe!

In a previous blog post, I wrote about observing tadpoles and knowing that at some point I’d look them up and learn more about them from others’ knowledge, but for now I was enjoying learning by watching. I told my husband about my desire to learn who was who among the tadpoles and so for my birthday he created a book for me called “Zoe’s Wogs.” He printed photos and charts from his research on the Internet and included his own drawings to make identification even easier. Now I can identify which tadpoles will turn into which frogs. I love it, and I love that I now have two means of knowing – my own experiences and observations and the accumulated knowledge of many ethologists and biologists.

So this blog post is my praise for learning, both experiential and book learning. How lucky we all are that we can learn something new each day.

As I’ve said before, please go outside. Take a look. Notice what you learn. And maybe read a book, too. What did you learn today?

Cheers,

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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9 Peaks, 13 Miles, 4,500 Foot Elevation

Posted on July 23, 2010 by zoeweil

I recently turned 49. It felt like a big birthday, 7 cycles of 7, last of the 40s and all that. When I was a kid, I was a gymnast. Then at 13 I started experiencing severe back pain, and I was diagnosed with all sorts of problems that would plague me for 30 years. And then, shortly after my back no longer really bothered me, I began dealing with incapacitating sciatica that morphed into bearable but challenging sciatica for a couple of years. For an athletic person who practices Aikido and dances, recurring and debilitating pain that prevents movement has been especially frustrating.

So, for my 49th birthday I set my goals high. I planned a 9-peak, 13-mile, 4,500 feet of elevation hike with my husband in Acadia National park. To psych myself up, I did 49 rolls in Aikido class the night before. We enthusiastically hit the trail at 8:50 a.m. on a misty day, seeing nary a soul for several peaks. By 5 p.m., when we were embarking on the last mountain, we were exhausted, but in reasonably good spirits, and the reward was a swim in a lovely alpine pond to cool off.

Now my calves are sore, but it feels great to know that at 49 I’m actually stronger and more fit than I was as a teenager. My back is strong, and I look forward to entering my 50th year knowing that when I set my sights on a goal, I can achieve it.

So can we all. So let’s set our sights on the most important goals: a peaceful world, a restored environment, a compassionate society, and an end to cruelty, exploitation, and oppression. There’s no reason we can’t achieve these goals, too.

For a better world,

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and The Power and Promise of Humane Education

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Building Empathy and Critical Thinking: A Lesson About Animals

Posted on July 21, 2010 by zoeweil

At our Summer Institute for teachers at the Institute for Humane Education, participant Betsy Messenger, who is the humane educator at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary in New York, created a lesson on animal issues that was so effective and powerful, I wanted to share it with you. She gathered our group outside and “borrowed” my dogs, whose only task was to run outside and do whatever they wanted to do. Our job was to simply observe them and record on paper the kinds of activities and emotions they were demonstrating in one column, and in another column write down whether we had ever experienced similar emotions. While the dogs demonstrated some acts that people don’t normally do, like tearing grass with their mouths, the emotions they displayed – curiosity, playfulness, attention-seeking, joy, abandon, and so on – were ones familiar to every person.

After observing the dogs, Betsy had us get into groups of four and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, facing one another. Then she drew a circle with chalk just outside of our feet. As we stood awkwardly in our groups, enduring the close contact that is not the norm for our species unless we are intimately connected with a person, Betsy asked us to imagine how we would feel if we were to have certain things done to us — portions of our bodies mutilated, for example — and had us consider how long some might be required to remain like this (a year). After a few minutes she gave us the reprieve to move out of our circles, and she shared with us the reality for chickens and turkeys raised for food and eggs in modern agricultural facilities: intense confinement, debeaking and toe removal, ill health, and so on. Finally, she shared the story of one turkey who was rescued from such a factory farm and showed us photographs of this particular turkey, a positive note on which to end the 20-minute activity.

What I loved about Betsy’s activity was the sequencing of observing another species and relating their behaviors to our own, the kinesthetic experience of pretending to be poultry in confinement, the information about modern confinement agriculture, and the happy ending for at least one turkey. We went on quite a journey in 20 minutes, and Betsy managed to include several elements of humane education in such a short time, including: providing us with accurate information; fostering our curiosity and critical thinking; instilling our reverence, respect, and sense of responsibility; and raising our awareness of choices we can make. So powerful. It reminds me of how much learning can happen in such a brief time when someone carefully crafts a varied and meaningful activity.

(Betsy will be writing this activity up to include in the free downloadable activities in the resources section at our website.)

Zoe Weil
Author of The Power and Promise of Humane Education

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Imagine a Different Experiment: Ted Kaczynski and the Murray Experiment at Harvard

Posted on July 19, 2010 by zoeweil

I recently read an article from The Atlantic Monthly online titled “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber.” The author, Alston Chase, has corresponded with Ted Kaczynski at length and also wrote the book A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism. I first came across Alston Chase’s work when I listened to a Radio Lab podcast about an experiment conducted at Harvard during the 1950s. The experimenter, psychologist Harry Murray, had worked for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, studying (and creating experiments on) stress in interrogations. It’s unclear whether his experiments at Harvard were under the auspices of the OSS or whether they were independently motivated. According to Chase, it’s even unclear what the real purpose of the Harvard experiments were.

The experiments, conducted over a period of 3 years, deceived Harvard students and subjected them to severe stress and cruelty. At one point in the experiments, students were asked to write an autobiography and detail very personal accounts related to their sexuality, toilet training, and other intimate experiences. They were told they’d be meeting with another student, who had also written an autobiography, to discuss their various experiences. Instead, they were placed in brightly lit interrogation rooms, hooked to electrodes to monitor their responses, filmed through a one-way mirror — from which they were being observed — and then ridiculed, humiliated, insulted and victimized by an older stooge, not a peer as they were expecting. They were later required to watch the videos of themselves undergoing this humiliation and trauma.

Ted Kaczynski was one of the students in these experiments, and although he wouldn’t talk about them with Chase, it turns out that he had a huge negative response, according to the monitors of his stress levels. Chase explores whether these experiments influenced Kaczynski such that he became more predisposed to carry out his murders as the Unabomber.

When I heard about these experiments, and after getting over my shock that they were ever conducted, I couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened had a different experiment been performed. In one of the experiments Murray did, the students wrote their life philosophies. What if an experimenter asked students to write a combination autobiography, personal philosophy and goals for their lives and a “stooge” validated their ideas and encouraged their interests and supported their goals, and rather than humiliate them, extolled their virtues. What if they went over the top in the other direction? I’m not suggesting that this would be a good thing to do, but I wonder what the result would be. What might the students do with such praise and validation? Who might they become? How might Ted Kaczynski’s life have been different had this been the experimental protocol conducted over three years? And lastly, where are the social psychology experiments that seek to bring out the best in people so that we can learn how better to foster compassion, courage, honesty and integrity for a healthier world?

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Go Out and Seton Watch!

Posted on July 16, 2010 by zoeweil

In my last post I wrote about Seton watching, a form of nature observation in which one sits quietly and observes a small window in the natural world for at least 20 minutes. I’ve chosen to do this daily at our pond, and it’s been amazing what I have observed. I recently wrote about observing the rescue of two damselflies. I only noticed this because I was Seton watching and paying close attention.

Over the course of the past two weeks, I’ve been watching a multitude of frogs and salamanders at every stage of development. There are tiny, gilled newts, and full grown salamanders, and red efts ready to emerge for their time in the woods. There are tadpoles from half a dozen different species, all in various phases of their transformation into frogs. I’ve been watching them grow their rear legs, and then their front, and move onto land, and slowly reabsorb their tales. I’ve listened to the trilling of tree frogs, the peeping of peepers, the honk of bullfrogs, and beeps of green frogs. My foot has been the way station for an emerging frog. I’ve noticed the way in which some species of tadpole are bold, while others quite shy and how the full grown salamanders are the most skittish of all, ascending quickly for air only to dive down to the depths as fast as they can.

I’ve watched huge water scorpions swim laboriously as they paddle through the water with skinny legs. I’ve watched hundreds of damselflies with their iridescent blue backs mate and dip their fertilized eggs into the water. My legs and arms have been the resting spot for many.

Mostly I don’t know much about what I’m observing, at least not in the scientific sense. I don’t know the names of the different species of tadpole, nor the life cycle of the water scorpion. I could find out of course, and I likely will; but I am experiencing so much just through observation, and I’m reluctant to turn to books quite yet. I want to discover what I am able to learn and know by carefully watching what’s around me.

I recommend such an activity to everyone, but especially children. In our media-saturated, indoor- or sports field-focused world, we neglect to experience the magnificent natural world that sustains us all. We do this at our peril, as a failure to cultivate our wonder often results in our failure to protect what we neither experience, nor understand, nor love.

As I’ve said before, please go outside; for yourself and the world. And try sitting quietly in the same spot each day for 30 minutes and notice what comes.

Enjoy!

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Observing the Natural World & Creating Poetry

Posted on July 14, 2010 by zoeweil

During our Summer Institute, June 28-July 2, we introduce the participants to a form of nature observation called “Seton watching.” Each of us finds a place at the Institute for Humane Education’s meadow, woods, or by the pond to sit and observe a small window of nature for 25 minutes. It’s always remarkable how much we each see when we slow down, cast our gaze narrowly but intently, and just watch.

One of the participants, reading teacher Carolyn Ericksen-Buss, was moved by this simple act of observation to create an activity for her presentation in which we went outdoors in pairs, read aloud a Gary Snyder nature poem for inspiration, and then chose a small window to observe before creating a joint 12-line poem. We composed the poem by having each member of the pair write a line, going back and forth until the poem was complete. It’s amazing what little gems of poems were created in just 10 minutes!

What I loved about this activity was that it effortlessly brought humane education to the study and act of writing poetry. By first reading a poem, then choosing a small window in nature, we both learned from a master poet and summoned our skill at observation and evoked our reverence for the natural world along with our imagination and creativity. There was no time to critique in the 20-minute time frame, and so we had the rare opportunity to revel in our creative impulses and joy in experiencing the natural world without an inner, or outer, editor.

This is a gift any language arts teachers can give their students.

Zoe Weil
Author of The Power and Promise of Humane Education and Most Good, Least Harm

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What Superhero Would You Be?

Posted on July 12, 2010 by zoeweil

During our Summer Institute for teachers, June 28-July 2, participants offered the group short presentations on any humane education topic. Andy Beardsley, a high school English teacher, explored superheroes with us and then invited us to consider what superhero we would be, what powers we would have, and how our superhero story would originate were we to craft such an alter ego for ourselves.

Andy had already thought of the superhero I would be – MOGO Girl – so I was off and running. I immediately thought that my super power would be the ability to make people see the true impacts of their choices and feel compassion as they witnessed the suffering, cruelty and destruction that lay behind even the smallest decisions about what they ate or wore or purchased or chose for entertainment. For example, as someone was about to purchase a conventional chocolate bar, they would witness the slave children toiling in cocoa plantations that provided the cocoa beans, or as they were about to eat an omelet they would witness the chickens crammed together in battery cages, unable to stretch a wing and the male chicks from egg-laying hatcheries ground up alive for feed and the spent hens on the slaughterhouse lines, many of them still alive as they’re dropped into the scalding tanks to loosen their feathers. The ability to see would alter people’s choices and compel humane and sustainable changes in our culture. It would be the culmination of my work as a humane educator rolled into an effective super power that motivates us all to change, based on a combination of our knowledge and our care.

Now I just have to design my costume!

What I love about this activity is the opportunity it provides to kids to imagine themselves as heroes, righting wrongs, making a difference, having the power to do great things with their lives. Instead of simply loving other superheroes, Andy had us using our creativity to imagine ourselves as superheroes. What a gift this is! To be invited to see ourselves in this light is to launch a new vision for our abilities and our commitments and to recognize the hero within who has the power – even through imagination – to be a positive force for good.

What superhero would you be? What would your powers be? What effect does imagining this have on you? I welcome your thoughts.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, The Power and Promise of Humane Education and Above All, Be Kind

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Reflections on Our Summer Institute

Posted on July 9, 2010 by zoeweil

Last week twelve educators gathered for the Institute for Humane Education’s summer training institute for teachers. One teacher came from down the road a half mile, and another from Hong Kong. We ranged in age from 19 to 69. What we had in common was an interest in bringing the most pressing issues of our time to youth in order to prepare them to be engaged and active citizens dedicated to creating a healthier world through whatever fields they pursue. It was a fabulous week, and I learned so much from this great group of educators. In the coming days I’ll be sharing the creative activities they shared during their presentations, and we’ll be adding many of them to our free downloadable activities at www.HumaneEducation.org. Stay tuned!

Zoe Weil
Author of The Power and Promise of Humane Education

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