Teaching, Living, and Learning: Puzzles and Teaching

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Puzzles and Teaching

On these snowy winter days, I’ve sometimes settled myself in front of a jigsaw puzzle for a few minutes at a time, hoping to find places for some pieces, and it often reminds me of putting the pieces of my English teaching together day by day. Doing a complex puzzle requires, above all, a certain kind of resigned and unruffled patience, and isn’t the same true of teaching middle school students? I can sit at the puzzle table for fifteen full minutes and find no good fit, and I feel a similar frustration in teaching a lesson when nothing seems to fit for minutes at a time. What’s wonderful, though, is that patience always produces results – a mystifying piece in the puzzle suddenly fits perfectly, and a lesson, out of the blue, brings itself together like a solved mystery. It simply takes sitting patiently at the puzzle table and waiting, and working patiently with my lesson plans while letting success come slowly into sight.

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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