Teaching, Living, and Learning

Monday, June 02, 2008

THERE’S ALWAYS PLENTY OF LAUGHTER

June 2, 2008

As I was walking into the grocery store yesterday, I saw two women laughing together on the sidewalk, and it suddenly occurred to me that this is happening all over the world. At any given moment, probably more than a billion people are laughing all around the globe. I may not be laughing, but there’s certainly plenty of laughter happening -- here, there, and everywhere. I may be in the depths of some personal sorrow, but at that same moment, guaranteed, laughter is rippling from New York to Jakarta, from the north to the south pole. The truth is it doesn’t matter if I am not laughing at a particular moment. What matters is that laughter is happening throughout the world, and I am part of that world. If the world that I am part of is doing a lot of laughing each moment, doesn’t that mean that I am actually part of the laughing, and shouldn’t I rejoice in that fact?

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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