SPLENDOR AND GLORY

It may seem farfetched to think of my students as being “glorious”, and my classroom as “full of glory”, but that’s sometimes the way I see things.  One dictionary gives this as the definition of “glory”: "brightness, luster, splendor, magnificence", and when I think of my students the way they truly are, the definition fits. Every moment, each of my students is thinking an entirely new thought -- a thought that has come to them unbidden, in a magical and mysterious way. It’s as if the students have small suns inside them rising afresh each moment as they sit in English class. The class may be a lackluster one, but the thought that is being born inside them at 9:23 am or 1:09 pm is as fresh and formidable as a new star in the sky. If I see my students as merely physical presences in my room, then certainly they can seem the opposite of glorious. They can seem to be small, imperfect packages of life into which I’m trying to dump smaller packets of information. Regrettably, that is, in fact, the way I see them during some of my more wearisome classes. However, it is not the truth of who they are. A physicist would tell me my students are complex systems of energy spinning at super speeds, including multifaceted arrangements of ceaselessly proliferating thoughts. As such, there’s never anything old about my students. They are always new as they sit before me. They shine, persistently, with a youthful kind of splendor and glory.