Teaching, Living, and Learning

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

WHAT DID JACOB SEE?

“I have seen God face to face.”

-- Genesis 32:30

After wrestling with an “angel” (new ideas about reality) for an entire night, something amazing happened to the Biblical patriarch Jacob. One translation says he saw God “face to face”, which I take to mean he saw an entirely new way of understanding life. Principally, he saw that life is boundless, not limited. He saw that life is thought, not things; that life is impersonal, not personal; that life depends on the infinite, unplumbed universe, not on any microscopic “me”; and that therefore life is a harmonious dance, not a discordant struggle. This startling new vision caused Jacob to feel like a totally new-born person, so much so that he felt compelled to take a new name.

Hopefully I can keep this vision before me all day today. I don’t need a new name, but this new way of seeing reality would make for a day filled with miracles. I could see God -- the astounding truth of life -- face to face each and every moment.

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I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:
" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

...........

The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom:
"The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."
-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett