What Minneapolis Taught Me

The Teacher and the Activist

Lately I have been carrying a lot of rage and disgust as I bear witness to events unfolding in my old home of Minneapolis, and the world at large. Even from far away, I clearly remember that place and its impact on me as a young man.

Minneapolis was where I first began to understand myself as someone who cared deeply about the world and about justice. It was my first home after college. Instead of getting a “real job,” I walked into the local Greenpeace office and somehow never looked back.

I was surrounded by an unlikely and beautiful mix of steady Midwestern values alongside punk, activist, LGBTQ, hippy, change-the-world energy. The people I met there and the work of being an activist helped shape me. That choice quietly set the course for much of my life, even though I could not see it at the time. It eventually led me toward teaching. Toward a lifelong question about how to stay openhearted and have an impact in a world that so often feels cruel and out of touch.

During those years, my commitment sometimes took physical form. I was arrested a few times while protesting environmental issues. I remember the clarity and passion. The rush of certainty. The strange calm that arrived once the decision had been made. It was also, in some ways, a distraction from the inner turmoil and unresolved wounding of my younger self I have written about in past posts.

At the time, I did not yet understand my own intensity. What was labeled bipolar was already shaping how I moved through the world, though I was in deep denial. My highs felt like a return to normal, a sense of finally being myself again. Everything felt urgent and interconnected, and the suffering of the planet was my cause. That intensity carried real risk, pushing me beyond rest and discernment, and it also gave me access to courage. On the surface, fear had little voice. Beneath it all, though, lived a frightened little boy I did not yet know how to care for. My body often said yes before my mind could calculate consequence, making me willing to take risks others were not.

At sixty years old, that intensity still lives in me. I have not tried to erase it, but to tend and channel it. The courage is still there in a more grounded form which shows up at times in my willingness to be vulnerable and how I speak truth. It also shows up in the fierceness in how I love the children in my life and hold the container of my school. Learning how to care for that intensity is now part of both my teaching and my activism.

What I am sitting with now is different.

How do you show up as a caregiver when the feelings become too much? This, I have learned, is part of the real art of teaching. It is the work of navigating your own inner weather while holding responsibility for others.

Putting a smile on my face and showing up steadily for the families in my life has been harder these days. I know from experience that pretending everything is fine is not the path to health. Honoring whatever is present, whether grief, fear, anger, or despair, is essential. When I stop listening to my inner life, things get buried, and buried things do not stay quiet for long with my sensitivities.

Staying connected to and understanding what I am feeling has become a core piece of my self care. Still, I keep asking what to do with all this rage once I have acknowledged it.

Running my school through a non biased, social justice rooted lens helps. It does matter. But some days it does not feel like enough. Teaching, loving kids, writing this blog, all of it feels meaningful, yet incomplete.

My old activist self from my Minneapolis days has been knocking louder lately, asking me to do more, be more, risk more.

I can feel that younger energy stirring again. Not in the same way, but with a familiar hum. Part of me remembers how courage once came easily, how the line between care and self sacrifice blurred, how being willing to be arrested once felt like clarity rather than danger.

But I am no longer living only inside my own body.

I am responsible for children now. For families. For a community built on steadiness and trust. The risks I once took freely do not belong solely to me anymore.

And yet ignoring that energy feels dangerous too. The moment we find ourselves in is calling for all of us to figure out how to act, agitate, and disrupt. For me, intensity does not disappear when it is disciplined. It waits. If it is not given a conscious outlet, it turns inward. It becomes anxiety, despair, numbness, and for me, a path toward upheaval. So this too is part of my inner world calling for care.

So I sit in the tension.

Between the part of me that once went door to door gathering signatures, raising awareness, and getting arrested to bring attention to environmental injustice, and the part of me that now runs a respected preschool.

Both are real. Both were born from love and a call to service.

I believe that being a teacher in this moment requires us to be activists as well. Not necessarily in the ways we once imagined, and not always in ways that are loud or visible, but in ways that are deeply intentional.

The work of teaching has never been neutral. Choosing how we speak about belonging. Choosing whose humanity we protect. Choosing whether fear or care guides our classrooms. Choosing what books we place in children’s hands. How we expose and prepare children for the world at large. These are not small choices. They are moral ones.

How I take a stand going forward may look different than it once did. It may not involve being arrested or standing at the front lines. Or maybe it will? It may involve staying rooted when it would be easier to withdraw. Speaking when silence feels safer. Modeling courage that is steady rather than explosive. Taking risks beyond the safety of the life I have created.

I am not willing to separate my care for children from my care for the world they are inheriting.

So I let the activist and the teacher walk together. Not as competing identities, but as partners. One reminding me what is at stake. The other reminding me who is watching.

And maybe coming full circle does not mean going back, but going forward with my eyes open, my heart engaged, and my feet planted firmly in the life I have chosen.

And maybe, in some quiet and demanding way, it is still Minneapolis teaching me how to stand.

Much Love!

The Mad Preschool Teacher (He/Him)