Author: davidsabey

Ballroom Dance Could Save Your Relationship

| davidsabey


[Note: This post was coauthored by our sister Rachel Sabey, a professional ballroom dancer and dance instructor in New York City, shown dancing with her partner in the YouTube video. It is written in her voice. David’s dance qualifications are similarly impressive, as he is the proud recipient of an A and a bronze certification in the beginning ballroom dance class he took at BYU. Despite this auspicious early dance career, he set aside the glory and glamor of the ballroom to devote his time to the public service.]

When an engaged couple comes to me for lessons, they come onto the floor smiling at each other, holding hands. And just before we start, he leans over and kisses her on the forehead. It’s an adorable picture, one for a newspaper, until they start to dance. That’s when the fighting begins. Sooner or later (and usually sooner) nearly all engaged couples will fight while learning their first dance. Romantic images of waltzing across clouds with your new spouse quickly fade when you realize dancing isn’t as easy as it looks. As a dance instructor, I feel funny asking these adult students to stop fighting and listen to what I am saying. At times, I want to remind them that they are planning to spend the rest of their lives with this person and it’s not a good sign if they can’t even make it through a dance lesson. Of course that might be an untimely thing to say to an engaged couple, but the impulse can be hard to resist. Continue reading →

Radical Education Reform: Exhibit A

| davidsabey

education football 2.png

This post, a follow up to my previous “opening remarks,” has been a long time coming, but I found myself thinking about the NCAA football championship game, and realized I had stumbled upon “Exhibit A.” Saying that I was thinking about the football game may be misleading: I didn’t know which teams were actually playing, or when the game was until I googled it a few days before it happened. Obviously, I am not really a football fan, but I am generally aware of my alma mater’s team (BYU), and I occasionally watch a game, but I usually stop caring about football when BYU is no longer playing, which tends to be rather early in the post-season schedule. Furthermore, I have never played organized football, but I do participate in “turkey bowls” and other recreational games, although I sometimes wish that we’d play soccer or ultimate frisbee instead. Continue reading →

Resolving gun violence with passionate polemics wont work

| davidsabey

bridge-path-straight-wooden

I am sobered and frustrated by the news of recent shootings, and headlines cacophonic to the carols we sing at this time of year. And although I believe there are conversations to be had about gun control, I am also frustrated with the rhetoric from both sides of the debate because they so often employ alienation. Arguments laced with othering terms like “stupid liberals” and “clueless conservatives” may seem benign, but perpetuate the alienation that is epidemic in our politics and communities, which fertilizes seeds of hatred that eventually sprout in blossoms of bullets. Continue reading →

Simplistic Sexuality and the Decline of Discourse

| davidsabey

Discourse with Laptops

As a Mormon alumnus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, two recent events happened to coincide on my Facebook wall, flooding my feed with passionate rhetoric about sexuality and gender normativity: 1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) has been the target of much vitriol because of their policy change that explicitly declares members of same-sex marriages to be apostates. Journalists happily report on the thousands of Mormons who have resigned from the church in protest of this policy change. 2. Landon Patterson, the first transgender (from male to female) homecoming queen from a school in Kansas City, spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is being heralded for these cliché, but culturally resonant words: “Be You. Life is too short, and you’ve just got to embrace who you are.”

Here’s my beef: Issues of sexuality and culturally normative practices are complex, but the rhetoric around them is simplistic. Simplistic and passionate. There is nothing wrong with passion or simplicity per se; the problem is that the rhetoric does not correspond with the complexity of the issue itself. Continue reading →

How to Leave Your Religion

| davidsabey

Church

In a previous post, I discussed the parallels between my experiences in romance and religion. In brief, I suggested that love—and specifically marital love—is about choosing an individual more than feeling a certain way. The view of love as an overwhelming romantic attraction is problematic not only because it is unrealistic, but because it is fundamentally egocentric, focusing not on another person, but on one’s own emotional high. This egocentric approach to love seems likely to lead to unhealthy relationships and infidelity. That word—infidelity—suggests a connection between romantic relationships and religion. My earlier post focused on the leap of faith involved in choosing a religion and a romantic partner. In this post, I discuss the implications of a non-egocentric view of love as it relates to ending a relationship or leaving religion. Continue reading →

Radical Education Reform: Opening Remarks

| davidsabey

The graduating class of 2016 will be underprepared to write at the college level. They will also tend to shy away from STEM careers because of a quasi-collective mathematical incompetence. Something is going wrong. What do we need to change to better prepare these kids for college and careers?

I would be willing to bet that in answering this question, practically every reader automatically began to focus on some problem at the school or classroom level. This seems intuitive: Students aren’t being educated well enough? Fix the schools! To most of us, the entire education system—from the department of education to legislation like No Child Left Behind to the debate about charter schools—is nothing more than the undergirding of the neighborhood school. Schools are where the rubber meets the road. We think education and we think schools.

That just might be our problem. We have conflated education and schooling. Continue reading →