Teaching Journal
Day 117, Friday, April 3, 2009

It was a quiet day in English class, but that doesn’t necessarily mean nothing was happening. It was quiet in the sense that the activities themselves were quiet ones – silent reading at the start, then soft-spoken discussions about some poems, then muted goodbyes and thank you’s. There were no loud goings-on, nothing that was particularly entertaining or compelling. If people in the hall had passed my classroom, they might have wondered why there wasn’t more excitement in the room. Strangely, however, I did sense some excitement among the scholars during class. It wasn’t noisy excitement, or even especially noticeable. It was just the hushed, almost insubstantial excitement of good thinking and feeling. They weren’t jumping around with enthusiasm, but, sitting quietly in their chairs, they were listening to the poems, and considering them, at least to a degree. Their thoughts and feelings were not flashy, just simple and sincere. There was quietness, yes, but there was also, I suspect, some solid learning.