Teaching, Living, and Learning: A GRATEFUL HEART

Friday, July 26, 2013

A GRATEFUL HEART

"After the Rain",
oil, by Jane Hunt

An old church hymn asks for "a grateful heart that loves and blesses all", and this morning I’m giving some thought to the word "all". The hymn doesn't say "blesses some", or "blesses the good things that happen", or "blesses people who act the way I think they should act". It says "all", as in everything that happens, everything that comes my way – the pleasant and the unpleasant, the advantageous and the seemingly useless, the triumphs and the trouncings. Every aspect of my life, the hymn suggests, should be earnestly set apart and somehow honored. I should, in some way or other, bless everything that happens. As Shakespeare reminds us, blessings (he uses the word “mercy”) should not be "strained", but should be shared the way "the gentle rain of heaven" falls upon the earth -- indiscriminately, unconditionally, thoroughly. Rain falls on the beautiful and the bad, and the beautiful, and so should my blessings.

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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