Teaching, Living, and Learning: AN UNENDING SOURCE

Monday, November 19, 2012

AN UNENDING SOURCE

I spend a great amount of time worrying about how my needs are going to be supplied, but the truth is that an endless supply of resources is invariably available. Since my thoughts determine my reality, what I really need, in any situation, are helpful ideas. What I think is what life becomes for me, and therefore healthful, healing thoughts are the essential requirement in any circumstance. What’s wonderful about this is that there is no end to useful thoughts. Good ideas flow from a secret, unceasing source; they are always as accessible as a spring of continuously streaming water. It’s impossible to stop this endless stream. Wherever I turn, there it is, just waiting to help. It’s like never-ending money in a mental bank, and it makes me, and all of us, wealthier than dollars and cents could ever make us.

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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