Our Lady of the Lakes: Little Joys of Teaching

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Little Joys of Teaching

But I didn't tell you the best part about today . . .

I gave my students the end-of-semester evaluations, and thanked them for a lovely semester, and there was that awkward moment of my collecting my things to leave the room. And what did they do? . . . They applauded. :)

About the image above: My mother has been a wonderful elementary school teacher since I was in grade school. Although the level of writing and analysis of our students is obviously different, sometimes I think there isn't actually much difference between our work as educators! Mom has always brought home lots of gifts from her students at the end of every school year, and a Sandra Boynton mug with this picture is one I have drunk coffee out of many times in her kitchen. :) It seems apt for my circumstances now, although to update it for the modern classroom, we'd need to put a cell phone in the paws of the dancing ADHD kitten on the desk, and an iPod earbud in the turkey's ear and a laptop with YouTube showing the latest viral videos on the desktop in front of the lamb.

2 comments:

j-dub said...: yay! congrats.; December 7, 2007 at 8:55 AM
Ms Heather said...: thanks. yeah, it made me feel all glowy. :); December 7, 2007 at 10:38 AM

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) (Walden or Life in the Woods)

Listener up there! Here, you! What have you to confide to me?
Look in my face, while I snuff the sidle of evening;
Talk honestly—no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh—I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? Who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself