Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash
Some days, I spend a disproportionate amount of time confiscating student "science experiments" cultured in makeshift Pringle-can petri dishes. Or counseling students to make better choices than sticking their bare hands in the snow. And reminding myself that they are only nine years old, and their frontal lobes are still developing.
On other days, we explicate poetry. And I'm floored by the depth of insight in their young brains.
When I decided not to pursue a doctorate in literature at this time in my life (check out my letter for The Catholic Woman for more of the story on my discernment), I did grieve a little bit for my time in academia, for a part of my life I wasn't sure I'd see again. And some days -- on my "grass is greener" days, as a colleague of mine calls them -- I still grieve. Through rose-colored window panes, I remember my life as a graduate student, joyfully ensconced in literary conversations and weighty tomes. I spin fantasies of the professorship I could instead be working for right now, and I long for the elusive "what might have been" -- which ultimately boils down to simply thinking beautiful thoughts about deep topics, within ivy-covered walls.
And time and again, I tell myself I'm right where I need to be. Or someone else tells me so. Or God Himself does.
Over the last two days, my fourth graders have begun studying Walt Whitman's "That Music Always Round Me," (see the photo below) in preparation to recite it at our school's First Trimester Presentation of Learning Day next month. We read it through a few times before I asked them what Whitman was writing about there -- music like the kind we're familiar with (country, hip hop, pop, folk)?
No, they said. The music of everything. What the whole world makes!
Now we're talking. I sat up straighter in my chair at the front of the room, and my heart raced with the giddiness that comes when my students are on the edge of an epiphany. Tell me more.
I asked them to turn to a partner and create a list of all of the sounds they hear around them on a daily basis, sounds that also "make music" in the world. The list in the space underneath the poem here captures what they came up with:
Their list left me awestruck -- and not just because they'd focused well enough and long enough in their partnerships (without descending into out-and-out chaos) to come up with all of these examples, but because the eagerness with which they took to the activity and shared their thoughts speaks to their earnest desire to listen to the world they're in. And ultimately, to look beyond what they hear to the reality of the One conducting the symphony, filling this world with light and majesty and movement everywhere they look.
If I'd been afraid that fourth graders couldn't ascend to the level of contemplation that the students I may sometimes wish I taught at the college level could, over the last two days, they reminded me I have no reason to worry.
I really believe that the human spirit is prone to wonder, to marvel, and to connect the dots back to our Creator. To yearn homeward, heavenward. And perhaps education is nothing more than the work of teaching us how to wonder well.
College students can do so with more articulation, perhaps, than fourth-graders can, but the latter are every bit as perceptive. Maybe even more so.
And as I turn all of this over in my head, I see God smile at me and hear Him say, "Do you see? Do you see what becomes of your longings when you just give everything to Me?"
I am not -- for now, at least -- on the road to becoming a professor. But I am leading my students to beauty, truth, and goodness. To Him. To wonder. And they are leading me in turn. It looks a bit different than I thought it would, this time last year.
But He is good. And I am grateful.
And fourth-graders? They are just amazing.
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