Good-bye and thank you letter to my 6th and 7th graders after first experience of student teaching.

Dear everyone in class V, Y and Z,

I could not feel more blessed to have spent the past few months with you.  This was my first experience ever of student-teaching and I want to thank you for spoiling me!  My experience would not have been the same if any single one of you were missing.  You each bring something unique and equally precious to this classroom and the world.  Always know this.  As a well-known Irish playwright and writer, Oscar Wilde, has quipped (a quip is a clever or witty remark), “Be yourself.  Everyone else is taken.”  

My teaching philosophy is: “Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”   I hope you have felt how much I genuinely care about all of you.  I know that each of your goals and dreams are only a thought away from becoming realities.  Think about what this passage means to you, from the ancient spiritual texts of India called the Vedas:

You are your deepest desire As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

Think about what you truly desire.  If it will benefit not just yourself but all who may be touched by it, then, as Ghandi has shared, “Everything your heart desires must come to you because the universe is infinitely bountiful and you have put forth a clear request.”  When you do this, you are in touch with the laws of nature which create the impossibly complex and beautiful natural world around us according to the principle of harmony.  Rain doesn’t just fall on a raindrop’s favorite flower, it waters and gives life to all it touches.  The ocean doesn’t just give one wave to one surfer; there’s room for millions of surfers.  The sun doesn’t just shine on a favorite strip of the Earth, it warms and nourishes us all, as well as all of its animals and plants.  A famous mystical poet from the 14th century named Hafiz once said, “The sun has never said to the Earth, ‘You owe me.’  Only a love that strong can light up the entire sky.”

I say this to guide you to consider that if you pay attention to the silent processes of nature around us, we learn keys to successful and harmonious living. I know when I look out over the sea at sunrise, busting the seams of the sky with with a rainbow-sherbet bouquet of neon colors, or when I gaze at a mountain range heaped with pristine white snow, each demure flake twinkling like angels with secrets they are winking in my direction, I can only see beauty at work and a feeling of gratitude for getting to share in these gifts of nature.  We didn’t have to be given such gems, but they are here for us.  And I believe we can learn from them because we all come from the same mysterious place that inspires so many to wonder about.  Where DO we go when we die?  Where were we before we were born?  Why are we here?  What is our purpose?  When a body dies, one second later that person is entirely different.  But why?  Where does that spark of life go?  What puts it into bodies and minds in the first place?  There may always be many more questions than answers, but we can say that even if we don’t know WHAT that source of creation and life is, we can’t deny that we all came from it.  We came FROM somewhere bigger than any of us individually, yet still a part of us once we are here (and perhaps after we are gone?).  If this SOMETHING that created you and me also created Crayola sunrises over the shimmering ocean, and moonlight draping hushed glow over mountains fluffed with snow, and if this magical force flows through me, too, then it seems I may have the power to create beautiful, harmonious things in my life as well.

This is a pretty mighty force to have on our side!  We are part of nature so we can tap into this creative principle by aligning with it through the power of thought, of positive, expansive, harmonious thoughts which seek the welfare of oneself and all.  Like the sun, who warms everything, discriminates against no one and asks for nothing in return.

Thoughts are as powerful as we want them to be; they are the parents of everything that comes to be in our lives, they give birth to all that we materialize.  A person, just like you and I, known by the name of Albert Einstein, once said that the most important decision you will ever have to make is to decide if you live in a hostile world or a friendly one.  The choice is entirely up to you.  Your perception is yours to own, and it determines the quality of everything you experience.   You may have heard the expression, “Is the glass as half full or half empty?”  There’s no right or wrong way to perceive something, there is only what feels right for you.  And the moral necessity to allow others to their own perspectives, perceptions and opinions, as long as they do not harm anyone or deny anyone the freedom to his or her own way of looking at and inhabiting the world.

Another way of putting it, that I’ve seen on a bumper sticker: Harm none and do as ye will!

So, my message to all if you is one of thanks, as I’ve learned as much this semester as (hopefully  ;]) you have!  And I cherish each of you for being the reason I decided to pursue the path of becoming a teacher of kids your age.  You all are more interesting, intelligent, compassionate, and wise than some of you may give your own selves credit for and my wish is that you only grow in confidence and self –love.  All those slogans about being able to change the world and make a difference aren’t just lofty and unrealistic catch phrases.  They are true because the secret lies in learning that it’s not about changing the world (which seems like an intimidating prospect!), it’s that when we transform our own selves, starting with being aware of the quality of the thoughts we think, we soon notice that the world does start to change before our eyes, and, hopefully, it becomes the friendly place that I’m sure we all would love to feel a part of.

…throw your pennies down Merlin’s well
-clink- -tinkle- -clank- *poof* —  a wealth of spells
Each wish, a vision, a seer’s truth
a soothsayer’s jaw all gummed with sooth
So brush your teeth and brush with care
make them shine and sparkle and ready for air
because when the tooth fairy lifts your pillow tonight
your wishes are headed for light years of brightness
Each little white piano key
a smile’s dashboard ivory
is headed for fame in a starry above
each tooth, a star, to be wished on for love
Yes tooth fairy knows where to store your grin
up up and away, the stringlights of heaven
So when you look up and make a wish tonight
remember their source is right inside you
Each tooth you lost is now lightyears away
the perfect morning star (a rising sun) to wake to every day.

With love,

Ms. Turner 

New student-teacher musings. *this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart. i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)*

I write kind of like a no-filter-Tourettes dandy, a beatnik sustained by an emotional fix engendered by authentic connection with students, and, hopefully, the world embracing all of us.  Einstein once said that a person’s most important decision s/he will ever have to make is – to decide if s/he lives in a hostile world or a friendly one.

This distinction vividly shapes, in essence, the quality of one’s life. So much of what we experience pivots on the all important axis of perception and when we expect a friendly world, we attract experiences to validate this reality.  Unfortunately, vice versa is true, too.  I think you can gather I’m quite the “friendly-world” proponent and thus, despite apprehension that often attends experiences poised on the threshold of eliciting positive growth and nurturing expansion (i.e. decision to be an English teacher and embark on this student-teaching odyssey), I always mush ahead, indefatigable in the belief that that which scares us has the potential to teach us the most about ourselves, leading to the more significant ability to then engage in the world with the potential to bring most benefit. Only from a place of complete self-awareness can we – like Hegel said, “self recognition in recognition of otherness” – truly relate to and thus empathize meaningfully with those around us.

My philosophy rests on the premise that when we truly know ourselves, we also experience ourselves, and thus everyone else, as love, because it’s who we are at our core, essential, energetic forms.  Paraphrasing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a Sherlock Holmes story called The Naval Treaty, only an Intelligence who loves His/Her creation gives it such beauty as the rose.  ”What a lovely thing a rose is … Our highest assurance of the Goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.  All the other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance.  But this rose is an extra.  Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.  It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”  Taking this further, Fibonacci’s spiral exhibits this principle of exquisite, mind-explodingly beautiful complexity; a demonstration of an organizing principle motivated by love and goodness, to give such glorious, mysterious wonders for us to simply enjoy.  (My favorite analogy to the Benevolent Intelligence principle behind creation is imagining a colossal junkyard filled with all manner of corroded, oxidized, derelict refuse and garbage.  Then imagine a tornado sweeps through it, leaving a Boeing 747 in the place of all the chaotic random junk.  Yup, to me, it is not just improbable but impossible to imagine anything other than an incomprehensibly sophisticated loving intelligence as the organizing power behind our bewilderingly complex and beautiful universe, including every single being within it.)  So things like the Aurora Borealis, or Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio sequence found in things like flowers, petals, seeds, cones, shells, and many more natural phenomena only begin to exhibit, to me, the proof of the Aesthete who loves His/Her/Its Creation and infused in it a natural order and exquisite harmony.  And these are nothing compared to the complexity of the human form and psyche! Science even has a name for the mystifying wonders of the heart, they call it “The Hard Theory!”  They can analyze and recreate so much on the physiological level, but on the metaphysical, or abstract, “irrational” level of emotions, they don’t even have a theory to explain things like love, intuition, creativity, hope.  Thus, they are only at the stage of calling it “The Hard Theory” which I get such a chuckle out of.  Speaking of naming things, here is another aside, which is really a central notion, at the same time.

I recently read an article by Ruth Vinz, “If We Could Only, What?” where she deftly articulates our naturalized penchants for drawing pedagogical boundaries around students and their potentials.  This is a fancy way of saying that we, as human beings (much too enamored of ourselves as human doings and not human beings, uncomfortable as we are with simply being, in favor of the Descartian predilection to dichotomize, and thus must be always be thinking to predicate being) are addicted to categorizing, compartmentalizing, judging, evaluating, labeling and thus limiting everyone and everything. Kirkegaard said, “When you label me, you negate me.” To label something as “this,” it automatically breeds the ground of conflict, because to be “this” necessarily implies to not be “that” and hence, a world of tension and division ensues, where we cling to artificially imposed identities, feeling that without these designations to give us a sense of presence, of validation, of “I Am Here-ness,” our beingness, our identities, our sense of ourselves would likewise die. We are in the ingrained habit of generalizing the unique, of simplifying the complex, of trivializing the significant/unusual, of reducing the irreducible.  It’s easier to deal with the static image and expectation of what we want from someone or a group of people, than it is to face the bewildering and problematizing individual natures of unique individuals who resist the miniaturinzing process that our culture has naturalized into its process of socialization.  We like to make people smaller than we really are.  We condition people to be afraid of their own natures, if they stick out and don’t “go with the flow.”  We prefer docile sycophants who follow the herd, but think about what we step in if we really do follow the herd.    In one of my favorite bumper stickers, “God, protect me from your religions!”, we demonstrate how religions serve to separate and breed distrust and judgment, more than cooperation, tolerance and collective will to elevate consciousness to new levels of connectivity and family as diving beings.  I love HG Wells’s witticism: “Moral righteousness is just jealousy with a halo.”  Probe most dogma and hypocrisy will surface.

When we prefer to look at kids as the easy, reductionalized brands we stamps on them, like herds of cattle to the slaughter – “special needs,” “disturbing element,” “slow learner,” “problem child,” “lost cause,” etc., not only do we alienate ourselves from ever truly knowing these kids authentically, we also alienate ourselves from our own nature. As Lao Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, emphasizes, labels are only words and words are only noises in the air.  No one ever got wet from the word “water” and no wood ever burned from the word “fire.”  No child will ever be known, and thus loved, if we relate to the taxonomic title we stick to his or her forehead, instead of taking time to borrow new eyes with which to see him and be courageous and against-the-grain/caring enough listen to her with new ears.  This is also what I love about Gertrude Stein: she purposefully invents new and profoundly abstruse-seeming lexicon and parlance, for the express, fundamental purpose of jolting us out of our lockstep hypnotism of thinking along such linear and homogenizing lines.  She detonates our intellects by mystifying us along the lines of language, so that we have no choice but to approach meaning-making, and thus the world, in new, fresh, and original ways, inhering the possibility to finally discover truth and authenticity, that has grown ossified and stagnant through the repetition of status-quo thinking.

Emerson said “a floolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I believe love is inside every one of us, and not only that, but the essential ingredients of us all are this love-substance-matrix so we are much more connected than the divisions of bodily form like to delude us into thinking, leading to all the ‘isms and polarizations that divide humanity on small and large scales. Without bringing spirituality into this (secular, scholarly/conversational) discussion, from a quantum physics perspective, spinning our protoplasm at blindingly rapid speeds until the essence of energetic wisps of probability waves, subatomic indivisible units of “emptiness” with the potential to crystallize into observable particles from diffuse identityless waves, are revealed to be what we are. The building blocks of all disparate matter, are revealed to be these uniform vibrating photons of possibility. And when we look at ourselves as made up of the same essential stuff, one race as the “Human” race, it’s easier to make the leap that in loving ourselves, we are also loving all.

I’d like to end on a Mark Twain quote that quaked my world open like a 10 on the ontological semiotics scale: “Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushes it.”  And another from Native American lore: “No tree was ever foolish enough to war with its own branches.”

What I mean is that I chose to become a teacher because I have a good does of Holden Caulfield in me and believe in the inherent goodness and, not only that, but downright beauty and awesomeness! of children (well, everyone, but it can be perhaps best approached and cultivated before kids fall into the homogenizing and desensitizing rye).  I forgive every kid for “acting out” or “being pains in the asses” in the classroom as they struggle to find an identity while reconciling so many shaping, sometimes antagonistic and confrontational, forces thrust on them at middle school ages.  And, per my second proverb above, I see nothing as a problem, a conflict, a war to be battled.  I see everyone (in this context, in the classroom, with me as a teacher-to-be) as members of my own family and I care about them as much as I do myself.  Confrontation, or perceiving a “difficult” classroom as a hostile environment only causes defensiveness and the closing down of students, who detect there’s something “wrong” with them and therefore the natural response is to want to hide.  We can catch more kids (before falling into the rye of phoniness and blunted authenticity caused by society’s marginalization of those who don’t “fit in”) with honey than we will with vinegar of toxic labels that focus on what they can’t do than what they can.