Teaching, Living, and Learning: REJOICING IN AFFLUENCE

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

REJOICING IN AFFLUENCE

I have always loved the fact that the word “affluence” derives from the description of flowing water, and this year, as usual, I see a lot of this affluence in my classroom. I’m not speaking of dollars and cents, but of ideas that don’t stop flowing from the start of class to the finish. They don’t always flow in the directions I might have planned for them, but they flow nonetheless – effortlessly and relentlessly. My classroom is an absolute sea of ever-flowing streams of thoughts, coming and going and getting started again and again. Occasionally, just to prove this to myself and the kids, I ask them to stop thinking for sixty seconds, and of course it’s an impossible request. Their lives, and mine, are non-stop rivers of ideas that no damn can bring to a standstill, and I rejoice in my good fortune that finds me in the midst of these rivers for six or seven hours each day.

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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