Many of the more profound moments in my life are a matter of happenstance. And what is more, they often achieve a level of profundity after much time has passed since the original event occurred.
We reshape the past to better justify our present, which in turn creates our future.
“Look Mr. Neal,” Nick announced, laughing for the first time since Christmas, “I found a dime.” This comment had nothing to do with anything we had been doing in class, which was not a surprise. Nick thought about football. However it was the best literary comment from any of my students that year.
On my wall at work:
“Sometimes all it takes to be happy
Is a dime on the sidewalk.”
-Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser
I don’t have a clue what I am teaching.
The old saw, you have to have a plan or you plan to fail does not work in my classroom. A better saying would be: You can never be lost, if you don’t know where you are going.
My more persnickety colleagues have accused me of teaching nothing. I can accept that: as Jane Yolen wrote, “Nothing is always.”
What bothers me the most about workshops where they sell you prepackaged teaching programs is that there is always a specific goal, an answer, to what they are selling.
There is never an easy answer.
I teach nothing, but I work very hard at it.
“It must be nice to just sit around all day, read, and not teach anything,” the history teacher said to me as she walked by my room and saw me sitting on the floor with my 12th grade students silently reading different books.
Yes, it is.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
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3 comments:
I love you, teacherman.
LKS
I, too, embrace ambiguity.
Peggy
Thank you for writing. When I was 1st year in 1996 in a tiny coastal town of immigrants in CA we had to do a portfolio for BTSA. Fluent in Spanish, I didn't need portfolio to get a job, but I did need SOMETHING, a way to process the overwhelming need and loss and sadness that walked through my door in those 27 little bodies every day so that I could become a funnel, a funnel of joy--to be so focused on the joys, the smiles, the space of safety and laughter and fulfillment I tried to create in the six hours I had them despite, or in spite of what society was doing to the rest of their lives. I wrote a watercolor book titled "process is the product." I decided that the MOST important part of my job was to allow them to be happy. That HAD to be my priority, and that alone had to be fulfillment. You do good work. Your post made me weep. Thank you.
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