Teaching, Living, and Learning

Thursday, March 14, 2013

I taught a fairly successful college class last night, mostly because I made all of us, myself included, do some serious thinking as we read and summarized paragraphs in a James Baldwin essay. He is a sometimes perplexing writer, and all of us had varying difficulties trying to take in his main points and present them in shipshape summaries. It was a good workout for the students (and their professor). I might try to find more time for this kind of in-class mental calisthenics.

"Breakfast at Don Gaspar", oil,
by Sharman Owings

This morning Delycia and I joined some good friends for breakfast in Stonington Borough -- boiling hot coffee for me and a well-made omelet to share. Then home for some reading aloud of Middlemarch, an hour or so of quiet writing for me, and then some trips to various shops with Delycia to find some new frames for my glasses.

Music I listened to today: 2nd movement, Beethoven Piano Trio No. 1 in E Flat, Op. 1 No.1

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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