January 20, 2025
By the Inspired Teaching Staff: Aleta Margolis, Brady Maiden, Cosby Hunt, Elizabeth Cutler, Jaqueta Abbey, Jenna Fournel, Kathryn Eliscar, Maria Salciccioli, Meag Campos, Micaiah Anderson, and Michelle Welk
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this issue.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is widely known as a day of service. Today we are thinking about the connection between service and curiosity. Look at how curiosity, and a quest to know more about people and ideas, threads its way through Dr. King’s biography:
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He entered college when he was just 15 years old and had secured his doctorate by age 25.
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His nonviolent approach to civil disobedience was greatly influenced by travels in India and what he learned about Mahatma Gandhi.
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His leadership depended on understanding and connecting with a wide diversity of people and organizations including labor unions, peace organizations, southern reform organizations, and religious groups.
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He was known for his talent at playing pool (a game that benefits from understanding physics and math) and used his skill to build relationships with those who joined him at the table.
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His speeches and writings were specially crafted to include references that might be touchstones for readers from sources including the Bible, the Constitution, and other canonical texts.
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As much as his work was rooted in the realities of his day, he was a huge fan of Star Trek — a show he was said to watch with his whole family.
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He published 5 books in a 10-year span.
Carrying forth the legacy of Dr. King is as much a call for curiosity as it is for service. This idea is present in words from an address he gave at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa on October 15, 1962:
“I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.”
What a fitting quote for our present day.
As we’ve written before, Webster’s word of the year for 2024 was polarization. We propose curiosity as the word for 2025, and we invite you to be part of the kickoff to this effort with the 7-Day Curiosity Challenge that launches this Tuesday.
You can get a jumpstart today.
Make a list of everything you are curious about right now. Your list may include everything from what you’re having for dinner tonight to how to help those who lost everything in the LA wildfires. Just write it all down. Keep the list going until you’ve exhausted every corner of your wondering. Take a moment to marvel at all the places your mind can go.
Then start thinking about what you’ll do to turn that curiosity into action.
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Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.