Teaching, Living, and Learning

Thursday, February 05, 2009

"Open Door", oil, by Fred Bell

Teaching Journal

Day 89, Thursday, February 5, 2009

We had a surprise visitor in one of the 8th grade classes this morning, and I, for one, found it invigorating. It's refreshing to have an audience in the room, someone to share the fun of teaching with, someone who gives you the feeling of being on stage, presenting a show, winning over a crowd. I usually don't consider teaching to be much like 'entertaining', but when a guest is with us, my work does seem to take on some of the glamor of a stage production. I feel a tingle of trepidation and a glow of excitement. I'm not sure the students learned any more today than they usually do, but there's was a cheerful tension in the room that added a thrill to my usual duties.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

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