Teaching, Living, and Learning: THE TIME HAS COME

Friday, May 17, 2013

THE TIME HAS COME

"Yellow Apple with Alarm Clock"
oil, by Hall Groat II

I have often heard the phrase, “the time has come”, and more and more it seems like a significant truth to me. The time, after all, has always come. The present moment has always been all there really is, has always been splendidly arriving with flags flying. It’s like the entrance of a procession, or a powerful person, or a stunning sunrise, each and every moment. It’s like a band beginning to play a stirring song, every single second. If I’m sitting at my desk typing, or talking to my wife while spring winds are shifting in the trees, or if I’m simply sitting outside in the generous sunshine, the time has come. Every second, I should hear an orchestra starting up with a symphony, should shout like someone who just received the greatest news, for the time has truly come.

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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