e. e. cummings has said:
…I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance…
This makes me reflect on the notion that we can learn from the pure birds/students in our classes how to respond to them with respect in our teaching. Such kids are rare, but they are there.
It’s those kids who just seem to be there to give, to care, to support us in our daily travails, the ones who never seem to get mentioned. Not all kids deserve are best efforts, being ungrateful and problematic little shits, but not through any inherent flaw, really – it’s just how they were raised. No blame.
There are, in schools, only a few kids with such high levels of pure character and it is part of our jobs, perhaps one could suggest, to learn from those students, those pure beings, how to reach our other students. How?
Such kids, if we pay attention to them (other than to just give them the A that they earn so easily), are thus not left out of the general purgatory of classroom life, but are involved in raising the vibration of the classroom, because we know their value and listen to them, and most especially bring them into the community instead of letting them hide like they mostly do in schools, since they really are diamonds in the rough.
Have you had any such students? They help us a lot more than we may be aware in our daily struggles with hurting kids.
An example of such a student is the Profe 2. Normally, in classrooms who don’t use the student jobs, they hide. But when we invite them into the class as a respected member of the community, someone we really value, all benefit. Isn’t that the way it should be? We benefit from each other? We enjoy life by the help and society of others*?
We don’t have to draw so much from ourselves so much when such students are around. It is all love, going around, being recycled from one who has love to others who do not. I don’t want to teach a bunch of kids grammar (teaching them how “not to dance”), teaching as if it were this all-day-long struggle, certainly, where no light is there since none of those pure kids are in that class.
Sean and I were talking privately about this quote, and he said:
…Oh, yeah. That’s a wonderful feeling to have: to know that it could only be one out of a thousand students. If just one student can teach us how to sing, or better teach, then all the rest will benefit. That’s so true, yet hard to acknowledge….