Teaching, Living, and Learning

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

"Passing Storm, Long Island Sound", oil on board, by Roxanne Steed

Teaching Journal

Day 96, Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Today I had the 9^th grade students listen to a lecture I had posted on the class blog, and as they were listening and taking notes, it occurred to me that it might have been a ‘boring’ experience for them. However, a few minutes later I begun asking myself what that actually means. What is a boring experience? What does it mean to be bored? The word is used frequently, but rarely (maybe never) have I stopped to consider its meaning. Checking one dictionary, I found that to be bored is to be ‘tired and impatient’. Is that what my students were feeling as they were listening to my lecture? Is that why they looked so weary and worn-out, so edgy and uneasy? Perhaps, then, the boredom arose not so much from the content of my lecture as from the fatigue and restlessness of the children. Is that, perhaps, where all boredom arises – from the hearts of the observer rather than from the substance of what is being observed? Does that mean that everything is exciting if we come to it with excited hearts?

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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