An Education

  
     It is an odd feeling to be sitting in a coffee shop typing at my leisure, while the first day of the school year is currently happening.  I woke up around 6:30, just to use the bathroom, and realized if I had been teaching I would be anxiously waiting in my classroom at that moment.  All of my decorating and lesson planning and encouraging self-talk would be thrown out the window, as it comes down to how I choose to love and interact with my students.  It all comes down to what my expectations are for my students and if I am willing to put up a fight for that standard.  It is a difficult fight-- one that teachers must battle with parents, systems, culture, their students, and even themselves.  To teach, you have to have thick skin-- not necessarily to manage poorly behaved students (which is still my biggest concern) but to keep persisting for your students to achieve and learn the most that you think they are capable of, against all odds.  It is a matter of how much fight you have in you.  Unfortunately, many of us chose this career path unaware of the aggressive undertone in education.  We chose teaching for the subject matter, for the learning, for the romanticized notion of attentive (and only sometimes naughty) children sitting on wooden benches in the town school house who would leave at the bell and go home to have taught facts and mores reiterated by their parents.  Clearly, this isn't the case.
     It is easy to become discouraged by all of the striving and the sense that education is still backsliding.  However, I still have hope that as long as human beings have that curious nature in them, there will be learning and there will be progression.  God has given us minds that need to be stimulated.  This jumped out at me when I was watching The Miracle Worker.  When Helen suddenly makes the connection that the particular movement of her fingers is a symbol for a specific thing, she goes wild.  She runs around touching everything she can get her hands on, eager to know the "name" for everything.  This movie is so good.  It is quite the tear-jerker, and I recommend it to pretty much everyone, from young kids, to adults.
    I'm not going to expect such dramatic results when I teach over in South Sudan.  God will work through me however He pleases to.  However, I am looking forward to doing my part in continuing this fight for learning amidst a broken world.
Scene from The Miracle Worker