Yesterday,
as I was lazily gazing at some passing clouds and noticing their ever-shifting
shapes, I was reminded of the students I taught, each one a constantly reshaping
and transforming collection of adolescent liveliness. The clouds I was watching
were the kind that seem stable, as though they are solid blobs of matter
moving along, but on closer scrutiny become slowly transforming swirls and
billows, and, in my long career in the classroom, I often mistook my students
in a similar way. They sat in class like solid and separate entities, each one
always ostensibly the same, always seemingly set in her or his ways, and yet I know
now they weren’t the same from one second to another. Like clouds, they sometimes
fooled me with their presumably fixed appearance. You might say they tricked me
into taking them for granted – “Oh yeah, here come the same kids I taught
yesterday” -- while all along they were transforming as constantly as yesterday’s
clouds. It’s a lucky thing to work with youthful miracles that are totally
remade each moment, and I, luckiest of all, did it for 45 years!
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