Word: shaper
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Making the speech the big story seemed right, putting Clinton in the role that makes kids comfortable: leader, shaper of America's future. "There are very few heroes for kids today," points out Marissa Rosoff, a child-welfare and attendance specialist for the Burbank, Calif., public schools. "What's sad about this mess," she says, "is that kids like Bill Clinton: he's young, he likes Big Macs...
...until just before the Christmas break that Henry Fassbender, shaper of ninth-grade minds at P.S. 117 in Huntington, Ind., finally found a moment to inspect the Amistad learning kit for himself. It had been sent to the school by overnight mail from DreamWorks, and the whole history department was aflutter. The graphics were compelling, the subject matter gripping, but as Henry sat in the faculty lounge carefully perusing the glossy pages, his heart began to sink. He could see his upcoming vacation unraveling with every page--victim to the unbearable lightness of a Hollywood learning...
Today, as she holds court at the Milky Way, her kosher dairy restaurant that serves jalapeno potato pancakes and encourages mingling ("someone called this the Jewish Cheers"), Leah doesn't even pretend to be the shaper of her famous son's blooming genius. Looking back on his youth, she says, "He scared me! I didn't know anything about raising children--couldn't change a diaper--and it took a concerted effort just to get him past his infancy. Now he has dimensions I can't even fathom. Most people dream. Steven dreams; then he fulfills...
...Leonardo's day, water was regarded as one of the four basic elements (along with earth, air and fire). He saw it as a major shaper of the earth, circulating in underground caverns and emerging as geysers and mountain springs, and infusing all of life--an idea he often incorporated in his art by painting curls of hair as if they were twirls of a whirlpool. In a premonition of the Gaia hypothesis, which compares the planet to a living organism, he writes poetically, "We may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh...
...people from different parts of the country, with radically different family backgrounds and interests, of the same ethnicity. This is not to say that race does not play a central role in the formation of identity. What I am arguing is that no single characteristic is the pivotal shaper of self. People are much more complicated amalgamations of the infinite forces, nurtured and natured, that have molded them. This personal complexity translates into a profound diversity that exists even among seemingly homogenous groups...