On Teaching: "Expressing Juice"

The word “express” is often used in conversations about education, as in “I want to help the children express themselves in writing”, but I haven’t often considered the word in the sense that it’s used in this sentence: “I am going to express the juice from an orange.” Here, we’re talking about doing something that takes effort and labor. We can’t get the rich juice out of the orange except by applying pressure to it, by squeezing it and thus forcing it to yield its sweet treasure. If there’s no compressing, there’s no juice. There may be an application here to my work as an English teacher of middle school students, for it is no doubt true that I sometimes must apply pressure in order to get the students to reveal the wisdom and artistry inside them. I guess you could say I have to squeeze my students now and then, because when I do, the best ideas sometimes start flowing like the juice from an orange. They are wonderful kids as they sit before me in class, but, like oranges, the real miracles are inside them. I express luxuriant juice from an orange, and I express ideas and creativity from my students.