Many of the more profound moments in my life are a matter of happenstance. And what is more, they often achieve a level of profundity after much time has passed since the original event occurred.
We reshape the past to better justify our present, which in turn creates our future.
“Look Mr. Neal,” Nick announced, laughing for the first time since Christmas, “I found a dime.” This comment had nothing to do with anything we had been doing in class, which was not a surprise. Nick thought about football. However it was the best literary comment from any of my students that year.
On my wall at work:
“Sometimes all it takes to be happy
Is a dime on the sidewalk.”
-Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser
I don’t have a clue what I am teaching.
The old saw, you have to have a plan or you plan to fail does not work in my classroom. A better saying would be: You can never be lost, if you don’t know where you are going.
My more persnickety colleagues have accused me of teaching nothing. I can accept that: as Jane Yolen wrote, “Nothing is always.”
What bothers me the most about workshops where they sell you prepackaged teaching programs is that there is always a specific goal, an answer, to what they are selling.
There is never an easy answer.
I teach nothing, but I work very hard at it.
“It must be nice to just sit around all day, read, and not teach anything,” the history teacher said to me as she walked by my room and saw me sitting on the floor with my 12th grade students silently reading different books.
Yes, it is.
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