Teaching, Living, and Learning

Sunday, June 01, 2008

EVERY DOOR FLEW OPEN

June 1, 2008

Along about midnight, Paul and Silas were at prayer and singing a robust hymn to God. The other prisoners couldn't believe their ears. Then, without warning, a huge earthquake! The jailhouse tottered, every door flew open, all the prisoners were loose.

-- Acts 16: 25-26 (in The Message, a paraphrase by Eugene Peterson)

Today every door has flown open. Actually, none of them were ever closed, but I didn’t realize it. Like many of us, I thought I was a prisoner inside a material body inside a material universe, threatened on all sides by every imaginable peril. It’s what I grew up believing, and my beliefs have held me prisoner. Today, though, I’m going to behave like a suddenly liberated prisoner, because the universe is far different than I thought it was. A wondrous “earthquake” of thought has destroyed the material restraints. I understand now that I live in a spiritual empire (the “kingdom of God”, as Jesus called it) where the only ruler is the eternal and boundless present moment. There are no doors, no locks, no walls, no separations. All the prisoners -- including me -- are loose.

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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