ADDING CHEERFULNESS

“A sense of contributing to form the world’s opinion makes conversation particularly cheerful.”

     -- George Eliot, Middlemarch

     Each day as I talk with my students about one thing or another, I feel almost continuously cheerful. There’s an easygoing, softhearted feeling that absolutely nothing can go wrong, that the students and I are working together to make the world a more sensible place and that the steady smile on my face makes perfect sense. We’re just a small collection of kids and an everyday teacher in an out-of-the-way classroom in the countryside of Connecticut, but what we do each day in our conversations creates something special that, I’m convinced, ripples out to the world in useful ways.  We share our thoughts with respect and consideration, which by itself works a small miracle in a world made wild by insolence and bloodthirstiness.  We listen thoughtfully to each other, looking for the wisdom in each statement, watching for small wonders in our words, choosing to add cheerfulness to the world instead of more meanness.  

EASY HAPPINESS

The music made him happy--
as happy, say, as a sky 
covered with comforting clouds, 
or a wagon waiting for a child 
to choose it for a ride, 
or even the pencil 
proudly lying beside him 
as he listens to the music. 
You can make life a problem, 
he knows, or you can 
carry it with you contentedly 
like an unsurpassed gift. 
He gets a lift 
even from looking at the fake
yellow flowers on his desk,
or from following the unfolding 
of a sentence as he reads it. 
Even dust on a sill 
sends him a message 
that starts him smiling. 

GLORIOUS THINGS

“I cannot help believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way.”

     -- Dorothea Brooke, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

     I guess I’m proud to say I am very similar to Dorothea Brooke, since I also believe in glorious things and see glorious things around me where others sometimes see ordinariness.  In my classroom, for instance, I sense the presence of magnificence as soon as my students come through the door. They don’t always make brilliant statements or give the best answers, and sometimes their expressions show more world-weariness than curiosity, but still, their hearts are holding steady in amazing ways, the cells in their bodies are being reborn with wholesomeness each second, and thoughts are throwing themselves around their minds like inspired dancers.  My students, as well as their ageless and delighted teacher, are as much miracles as every sunrise is, or every slightest sway of leaves in the fall. Why shouldn’t I believe in glorious things?  

"The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser

Book 3, Canto 3,  tells the story of Britomart's visit with Merlin, in which he tells the future history of Britain's kings. Again, the music of the poetry is magnificent. 

SPLENDOR AND GLORY

It may seem farfetched to think of my students as being “glorious”, and my classroom as “full of glory”, but that’s sometimes the way I see things.  One dictionary gives this as the definition of “glory”: "brightness, luster, splendor, magnificence", and when I think of my students the way they truly are, the definition fits. Every moment, each of my students is thinking an entirely new thought -- a thought that has come to them unbidden, in a magical and mysterious way. It’s as if the students have small suns inside them rising afresh each moment as they sit in English class. The class may be a lackluster one, but the thought that is being born inside them at 9:23 am or 1:09 pm is as fresh and formidable as a new star in the sky. If I see my students as merely physical presences in my room, then certainly they can seem the opposite of glorious. They can seem to be small, imperfect packages of life into which I’m trying to dump smaller packets of information. Regrettably, that is, in fact, the way I see them during some of my more wearisome classes. However, it is not the truth of who they are. A physicist would tell me my students are complex systems of energy spinning at super speeds, including multifaceted arrangements of ceaselessly proliferating thoughts. As such, there’s never anything old about my students. They are always new as they sit before me. They shine, persistently, with a youthful kind of splendor and glory.

THE MAD SCIENTIST IN ROOM 2

There’s a lot of precise, painstaking science in this teaching business, but also a lot of craziness. When I’m working my way through a lesson, I sometimes feel like a scientist who’s using sensitive, hair-splitting instruments while dancing. The work is both clear-cut and messy, both sensible and senseless. There have been countless times in the classroom when I seemed to be trying to systematically turn a tornado into a tidy organization of breezes. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this, since all of life works in a similar way. This morning, for instance, my thoughts are spiraling off in many directions, while at the same time my heart is making its precise rhythms and my lungs are lifting and falling with correctness.  There’s tumult of all kinds across the world, while at the same time stones are being exactly stones and air is being simply air.  Exactitude and craziness are comrades, including in my wild but well-ordered classroom.