“Love is in all things a most wonderful teacher.” Bella is now knitting baby clothes, and Dickens comments on how well she is adapting to sewing and knitting small things. Her love for her husband and the baby in her womb is the most wonderful teacher.
If you will permit me to take this line out of context, I think this would make a good motto for everyone who teaches. When people--especially children--feel loved and cared about, they can more easily reciprocate with a kind of love for their teacher which will help them learn. I certainly have learned most from teachers whom I felt cared about me and whom, consequently, I actually respected or even loved.
However, those who love whom they teach must be grounded in something (Someone) that can sustain the repeated treading on their hearts. To love is to open one’s heart, and an open heart is a vulnerable heart. When we love broadly we are often hurt by those who are hurt, or are careless, or are clueless. To love our students we have ourselves to be loved, to know we are loved. When my heart is safe in the Heart of God, I can learn to open my heart. I can learn to share in the treaded heart of God, the sufferings of Christ, the death of Christ, and then the Resurrection of Christ. With the bigness of God's heart in my heart, I can love. When I love those I teach--even if they seem to reject or ignore my love--love grows in them, love teaches them. And “Love is in all things a most wonderful teacher.”
2 comments:
You're reminding me that I really need to get my own copy of Shinichi Suzuki's book "Nurtured by Love."
This post resonates with the day I had. I have 12 piano students on Mondays and I start out the day praying to really be there with each one of them, one at a time, without growing tired by 8:30 pm ...
I have a funny moment with one of my students. He had taken off his shoes to be more comfortable and he had really cool socks, so I flippantly said at one point, "Okay, Mr. Cool Socks, let's check out your review piece ... " His twin brother called out from the other side of the room, "Ha! Mr. Cool Socks! I want a name too!" But the student at the piano said seriously to me, "Miss Michelle, I don't want that name ... " I responded seriously, "Oh, I'm sorry. Did that name not feel very good?" He shook his head. I said, "I'm sorry. You don't have to be Mr. Cool Socks. I really like your name just the way it is. I know I didn't always like the names people gave me when I was younger, too ... " "What names?" he wanted to know. "Oh, you know, Afroman, Pizzaface ... " He burst out laughing. "Why did they call you AfroMAN?" he yelped. "That was mean!" "I know! Exactly! THANK you," I said, laughing, shaking his hand. And back to the lesson. I sometimes feel I'm not teaching piano, but teaching life with piano practice as a method of dealing with it ...
Michelle,
I think all good teachers view teaching that way. learning the content, while important, is also a means to a greater end.
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