Teaching, Living, and Learning: GLORIOUS THINGS

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

GLORIOUS THINGS

“I cannot help believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way.”

-- Dorothea Brooke, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

I guess I’m proud to say I am very similar to Dorothea Brooke, since I also believe in glorious things and see glorious things around me where others sometimes see ordinariness. In my classroom, for instance, I sense the presence of magnificence as soon as my students come through the door. They don’t always make brilliant statements or give the best answers, and sometimes their expressions show more world-weariness than curiosity, but still, their hearts are holding steady in amazing ways, the cells in their bodies are being reborn with wholesomeness each second, and thoughts are throwing themselves around their minds like inspired dancers. My students, as well as their ageless and delighted teacher, are as much miracles as every sunrise is, or every slightest sway of leaves in the fall. Why shouldn’t I believe in glorious things?

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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