I hope you can make time for these two stories, the kind of stories we need right now.
1:
A Staten island elementary school choir teacher who really believes in his kids and teaches life lessons through music. And gets them to sing harmony, which is no small feat.
"You're making me cry - you're so on point"
"You have a connection to the song in the way you're singing it...Make sure that your audience understands what the song is about...You're going to show the meaning of the song just by your eyes."
"When they sang, they could be totally off key...if they showed they had music inside of them, I said "I can work with this kid.""
"I will cry, openly, in front of the children. I'm teaching them that music is an outlet for emotions, and if I try and stifle my own emotions, I'm being a hypocrite."
"When someone says something that hurts us, that we don't like it, we don't have to accept it. We don't have to hate them. Is it possible? Yeah it can happen. That's the problem in the world. People aren't listening to each other."
"You guys are really deep thinkers, you get it, and it gives me hope, that you guys are going to [be] next when it's your turn to be the adults and it's your turn to take charge."
"What happens in our room - it's an allegory for the utopian world were working towards... You guys are like the best medicine."
You can see him in action here:
"I just want them to love what they do and have passion, and if anything be competitive with themselves."
2:
And this Ted talk about a journalist's journey to discover his true calling.
From his original intent of bringing a scientific discovery to a moment of "Oh wow!" wonder...to getting his interviews to lead his subject to the moment of struggle - the "sigh" [that expresses] truths colliding and the struggle to make sense.
But how do you end that story...get beyond that struggle?
"I had chosen a conceit for this series that my soul had trouble with."
Dolly Parton, implausibly, would show him the way beyond the struggle. "She would force me beyond the simple categories I had constructed for the world." - "Don't bring your stupid way of seeing the world into my story."
"We love to fetishize difference, but journalists need to be the bridge between those differences. The story can't end in difference, it has to end in revelation."
When two people come together, they make a new entity, "the third," which is their relationship. His calling, his literal vocation, is to "find the third, that place where the things we hold as different resolve themselves into something new."
[It's better to watch this as the video: ]
[But you can listen to it as a podcast also: ]
Here's the episode where he links Dolly Parton's "hallowed ground" she's sung about for 50 years - to his Persian immigrant story.
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