Bamboo Bending: An Educator's Changing Corner of the Universe

In Bamboo Bending, distinguished teacher Morgan Zo Callahan weaves his multi-layered personal history into perceptive reflections on teaching, culture, and learning. His high-school and adult-school students motivated and pushed him to write this book, hoping that it would provide other students, teachers, and parents with encouragement and a direction for more effective and enjoyable scholarship. Morgan believes that by attentively sharing our stories and resources we can improve our schools and ourselves. Our minds and emotions must bend with flexibility, like a stalk of bamboo, to move the student-learner, whole and alive, toward maturity. Mixed with readings in educational literature, interviews with students and their parents, and anecdotes from the lives of his students, this mosaic of stories narrates Morgan’s own ups and downs in various educational and cultural playing fields, which map a journey into adult life. With a seemingly bottomless appetite for knowledge, the author touches on high-school and adult education, teenagers, Special Education, Chinese culture, Latin American life, Buddhism, neuroscience, child prodigies, beauty in nature, the Black Madonna the hospice movement, Alzheimer’s, friends who have enlightened him, dysfunctional families, the world’s poor, Einstein’s wisdom, and his anguish over his mother’s struggle with death, He reflects on Tiger Moms, sleep, volunteerism, missed opportunities, pranking, neurobics, Fellini’s La Strada, Matthew Shepard, the diminishment caused by rape and racial disparagement, and Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone.” He is always learning, interpreting, and affirming the talents, positive growth, and enthusiasm of his students. That is how his own journey is defined. Bamboo Bending combines a personal journey of discovery with astute, well-documented suggestions for a more effective and holistic education system. Filled with interviews and anecdotes from his years of teaching—and supported by research in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine—Morgan Zo Callahan’s book will challenge, inspire, and motivate all who interact with people on a daily basis.

Morgan Zo Callahan was born in New York City, studied at Jesuit schools, received an MA in Philosophy at Gonzaga University, took courses in political philosophy at Stanford University's Hoover Institute, and trained as a community organizer at the Alinsky Institute in Chicago. For eighteen years he taught mental fitness at convalescent hospitals, where he became interested in hospice work. Currently he teaches high-school SAT English and adult-school ESL. He's been fortunate to have traveled widely, meeting along the way many wonderful, interesting people in Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, El Salvador, Spain, Morocco, Costa Rica, Canada, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Italy, the Bahamas, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Morgan is the author of Red Buddhist Envelope and the co-author of Intimate Meanderings: Conversations Close to Our Hearts, published by iUniverse.