MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

Sometimes, my eye doesn’t seem to meet much in my classroom – some windows, a few pictures on the wall, some books and papers, and some often weary adolescent scholars. It’s easy for me to get sort of blinded by the minutiae of classroom life – the fussy goals of my lesson plans, the little behaviors and deeds of the kids. Occasionally my English classes appear to me, and perhaps my students, to be merely a group of people entering, sitting down, talking, listening, musing, probably sometimes daydreaming, and then quietly exiting. I guess the kids and I sometimes see the surface of things in Room 2 as fairly run-of-the-mill and unsophisticated. However, what we need to remember is that it is the surface, just the topmost layer of a substantially deep and complex reality. During class there are more thoughts swirling in the classroom than we could possibly count, more feelings floating around than leaves on the trees outside the windows. There are young lives (and one old one) being lived as strongly and successfully as winds blow in autumn. Right in front of me, universes of teenagedom are incessantly unfolding and speeding around, even if my eye sometimes sees just the faces of some middle school students, and maybe an itinerant bird passing by outside.