Teaching, Living, and Learning

Saturday, May 23, 2009

"Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen

The writing continues to be both plain and elegant, a trademark of Austen's. Here's an example: Catherine is looking out the window and hoping the weather will clear, when suddenly "a gleam of sunshine took her quite by surprise." The simple gracefulness of that phrase is impossible to analyze or imitate; it can only be admired.

Catherine is still in Bath with the Thorpes and her brother and the Tilneys. In this episode, she is hoping to go for a walk with the Tilneys, but, on a rainy day, she decides to accept an offer to visit a castle with Isabella Thorpe and her brother John. (She is hurt that the Thorpes apparently ‘stood her up’.)

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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