This work is not difficult. It is just different and we must change internally.
All the drama about NT vs. T is just froth. The real broiling right now is happening in the soup below. What is in the soup below?
It is that place in our teaching where we must train ourselves to know that, when we stand in front of our students, the real work is about becoming kind and seeing them as vulnerable, in the way that babies are vulnerable. That is our real work.
We must resolve to protect them by making ourselves perfectly clear when we speak to them. We can only do that from a place of soft heart.
We shift to the knowledge that we cannot reach them through our minds. They are children and they are here to teach us to be loving. How odd! A group of kids teaching us that we can only reach them through laughter and through the heart.
Which one will we do? This is really a big shift. There is the big soup below that we must go into right in those moments when we stand in from of them, and learn to feel, and learn to pick up on their little cues, those little cues that they send us during class, their shy little invitations to laugh and have fun with them because that is the way of children.
…and he said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven……
I think that this idea from Matthew 18:3 could be extended to include the idea that we will never be happy in our careers unless we become like children as well.