Teaching, Living, and Learning: The Mill on the Floss

Sunday, November 22, 2009

The Mill on the Floss

I'm now in Book 6, Chapter 8, and I'm beginning to think I'm not going to like the way this book ends. (There are still a good 200 pages left.) Maggie, such a good person, seems to be falling in love with the foolish Stephen Guest, who is already engaged to Maggie's best friend, Lucy. I know these things happen in real life, and I know a novelist's job is to portray life as it really is -- but still, I don't want this to happen. I don't want Lucy to be hurt, just as I wouldn't want someone like her in real life to be hurt. I guess I'm too much of an idealist for a book like this. Oh well ... let's wait and see what happens.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

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