Teaching, Living, and Learning: NO HOPE IN ROOM 2

Sunday, May 29, 2011

NO HOPE IN ROOM 2

It might seem strange to think of hopelessness as a desirable quality in a classroom, but in one sense, a lack of hope plays an important part in my teaching. Being full of hope implies that there’s something missing in the present moment, something that can be supplied in some future moment, but my aim is always to help the students feel fulfilled and find contentment in whatever we happen to be doing at any particular moment. Since there’s already enough wishing for and anticipating and looking forward to and waiting for in their young lives, in my classroom I ask them to try to take pleasure in just what’s happening right now. Be hope-less, I sometimes want to say: be satisfied with the pleasures of studying this stanza, or answering this quiz question, or listening to the surprising words of the classmate who is speaking, or just following your own unforeseen thoughts as they continuously soar across your mind.

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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