Teaching, Living, and Learning: Breathing Miracles

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Breathing Miracles

I wish I could see the breathing miracles in my classroom more often. One definition of the word miracle is “an amazing product”, and what is more amazing than an adolescent human being with all its cells shifting and transforming and its life leaping up in a brand new manner each moment? If my eyes had the power of electron microscopes, I would see dozens of marvels in the form of students each day, marvels of movement and memory and unblemished, ground-breaking thinking. Each spoken word in English class would seem a work of wizardry. A flash of eyes or a smile would be a spectacle to wonder at, and even a single breath by Sam in the back row would be cause for shouts of appreciation.

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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