Teaching, Living, and Learning: AS GOOD AS IT GETS

Friday, January 04, 2013

AS GOOD AS IT GETS

When a friend said yesterday that she was anticipating good news sometime soon, I said to myself that we all get good news each moment, if only we were aware of it. It’s good news, second by second, that a new breath brings freshness to my blood, and that cells in my body are constantly being born again. It’s good news that each moment is unusual, fresh, state-of-the-art, the latest and newest kind of moment the universe has ever known. It’s even good news that I am simply right where I am at this moment. For numberless billions of years the universe has worked in its easygoing way to, in due course, set a multifaceted and mysterious spectacle named Hamilton down in a specially chosen chair in Mystic, Connecticut on this specific freezing morning in the year 2013 at 4:38:37. For me, that’s news as good as it gets.

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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