Teaching, Living, and Learning

Saturday, August 02, 2008

THROWN FROM A HORSE

Today I want to be “changed”. Like Saul of Tarsus, I want to see a new and truthful way of living so clearly that I feel like I’ve been hit with a blinding light. I want to be thrown off my “horse” of material living, a horse I have blithely and ignorantly ridden for 66 years. I want to discover a new way. And really, the new way of living is a simple way. There’s nothing complex or tricky about it. It’s just totally different from the way I’ve previously been traveling. The old way was the way of belief that matter has the only and ultimate power in the universe. The new way says very simply: Spirit, thought, has all the power. It’s as uncomplicated as that – as straightforward as a flash of lightning, or falling off a horse. I want to look at the lightning, be blinded, and then see again – really see. I want to get on a totally different horse. I want it to happen today. (Maybe it already has.)

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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