Teaching, Living, and Learning: SECRET TREASURE IN ENGLISH CLASS

Friday, September 07, 2012

SECRET TREASURE IN ENGLISH CLASS

Each of my students and I keep a secret treasure hidden in our hearts. It’s grander than the great treasures of antiquity, more precious than pearls, just as spectacular as a sky at sunrise. We carry it with us everywhere, and it sits in its shining silence in the midst of us in English class. It’s a treasure many of us have lost sight of, or perhaps have never seen or recognized or understood -- the treasure of our own thoughts and feelings. No one who has ever lived has carried a fortune of feelings quite like ours, and no thoughts in all of history have sparkled like ours do. Each of us -- my insecure, unprecedented young students and their hesitant, silver-haired instructor -- holds thoughts and feelings that could carry the world in their currents, could create a new day every moment. We are walking and sitting and sleeping treasure chests. When class starts, I see the wealth waiting in the room, and it’s dazzling.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

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