TAKING IN, GIVING OUT

I sometimes seem to hear my classroom breathing, and it makes sense, since thoughts are consistently taken in and given out during class. It’s a seamless process, the giving and receiving of ideas as the students and I search through stories and poems and prepare sentences for essays. It’s a sharing that’s similar to the partnership seen in nature, where nothing survives by itself, but all is participation and synchronization. Winds pass among tree limbs and the limbs push the winds past, just as my thoughts make new thoughts for the students and theirs do the same for me. We can’t make it alone in English class. I take in an idea from a student and somehow, perhaps in the slightest of ways, it reworks my ways of thinking, and then I give out the gifts of my own thoughts. We think thoughts for each other. We break open the beginnings of new knowledge together.