Teaching, Living, and Learning: Newness

Monday, July 06, 2009

Newness

I have gradually come to understand this important truth – that oldness is nowhere and newness is everywhere. Every day is a totally new day. The sunrise each morning shines a little differently than it ever did before, and the breeze I feel when I walk outside blows in a faintly new way from yesterday, and from the moment before. Totally new things will happen to me today – the way a person smiles at me, the way people walk past me in the park, the way sunlight lands on my hands. Even each moment is brand-new each day. As I type this paragraph, new dust particles lie on my computer table in arrangements that have never existed before. The shadows from my fingers fall on the keyboard, not like they did yesterday, but in a slightly and wonderfully new way. Even each thought is totally knew each moment. This is the most astounding thing for me to realize. The exact thought that I’m thinking right now has never been thought before – in the whole history of the human race. It’s amazing – almost scary – to live in a world of such breathtaking newness.

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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