The Rainy Season
Tucker Elliot
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The only thing worse than losing hope is to be the reason someone else loses hope.”
“My dad once told me that his biggest challenge after returning from Vietnam had been coming to terms with his own callousness. He’d made a deal with the war and traded his humanity for a ticket home.”
“The reality for teachers is we don’t know if we’ve been successful or not. It takes years to see how a kid turns out, and it’s impossible to know what role we’ve played, for better or worse. It’s why so many teachers burn out—our successes are limited and rarely celebrated, but our failures are always out there for everyone to see and judge.”
“I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming a man to realize how lucky I’d been. It took a few hard knocks in life to make me realize the only thing my dad had ever wanted or worked for was to give me a chance at being better than him.”
“No matter the border, the Mekong has been an indiscriminate giver and taker of life in Southeast Asia for thousands of years. It’s a paradox like civilization’s other great rivers—be it the Nile, Indus, Euphrates, Ganges or China’s Sorrow the Huang He—for without its waters life is a daily struggle for survival; yet with its waters life is a daily bet that natural disasters and diseases will visit someone else’s village, because it’s not if, but when it’s going to happen that’s the relevant question.”
“It’s not that I had more important things to do or that I didn’t want to help with whatever problems were interfering with her students being successful—rather, it’s this horrible truth that life has taught me: misplaced hope is the most devastatingly painful thing you can give someone.”
“It was radicals like you and your father that hijacked your faith, hijacked a few planes, and made thousands of children orphans in a single day. You pretend my country beats you because you are poor, but you ignore that it was people of your faith that made this war. People like your father made this war. People like your father called for jihad. Well now you got it. You don’t like it? Tell the Imam that his ignorance made his people poor. You don’t understand Americans at all. We don’t beat you because you’re poor. You pissed us off. We’d beat your ass rich or poor.”
“Cope? Adapt? Uh, no. These are military kids. They roll with it. I once asked a new student, 'See any familiar faces?' She pointed out various kids and replied, 'Seattle, Tampa, Okinawa, New Jersey.' For military dependents school is literally a non-stop revolving door of old and new friends.”
“An individual school can handle a resident idiot from time to time, but an entire school system is only as good as its weakest leader.”
“We obviously don’t live in a perfect world. If we did, then my dad would never have volunteered for Vietnam so he could use the GI Bill to pay for college, Uncle Google would have more important things to do than searching for eight hundred million reasons why our schools suck, and I wouldn’t be at an education leadership conference in Jakarta because there’d be no need for it … right?”
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Book Keywords:
9-11, jakarta, korea, vietnam-war, indonesia, rainy-season, adolescence, military, success, dodds, vietnam, bad-teachers, hope, rivers, hatred, floods, education, teachers, fathers-and-sons, school, radical-islam, google, fear, students, war-on-terror, germany, laos, soldiers, china, leadership, schools, mekong, relationships, war, teaching, terrorism, veterans
