Teaching, Living, and Learning: LUCKY WORDS

Saturday, October 08, 2011

LUCKY WORDS

"So may some gentle muse
With lucky words favor my [teaching]."
-- John Milton, "Lycidas"

I love the idea of "lucky words", and I'm grateful to have been graciously given so many millions of them over the years of my teaching. Lucky means fortunate, but it also means magical and mysterious and felicitous and blessed. It means words that come to me like alerts from a wilderness when I'm teaching, words that work their way into my teaching the way water flows wherever it will. I don't wish my words into existence; they simply show up, one after another forever, flowing into my life and out to my students moment by moment. In a sense, they are all lucky words because they all bring me, in some way or other, the prosperity of this vast life that I, and all of us, are part of. Words work the best of all wonders, shining their lights so my students and I can see which ways to go in our studies. Every so often, I say a silent thanks to these promising signals, these always encouraging words that wander from somewhere into my teaching, time and time again.

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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