Tabula is Latin for a writing slate, and represents the educational tradition of the West. Tabernaculum is Latin for tent. Today, it houses the source and summit of the Christian Faith: the Blessed Sacrament.
Before tidy rows of desks, a teacher boldly paces. He is armed with a lesson plan, contingencies, and scripts. Crisp piles, copies of notes or worksheets or quizzes or homework (or all), lie ready for launch.
At the desks, measured little scholars bustle: a flurry of pencil strokes, a turn of the chair for partner work, the hurried snip of scissors along pages of notes.
Alternatively, disorder smothers every (not) well-laid plan like fog. Disobedient scholars rebel against the uninspiring leadership. Here or there, a faceless someone snickers. Undoubtedly, loud whispers pierce the the teacher’s control like leaks in a dam; the frazzled adult only has ten fingers.
I will here leave off further description. Experience best illuminates the breaking of the dam.
In either case, motion dominates the classroom. Activity rules the day. Amidst the motion dies a question: “What if we stood still?”
As teachers, we must never let busyness cloud our vision of what we hope for our students. In all planning, instruction, discipline, and grading, we must keep our noble purpose before us. Education frees. Thomas Aquinas beseeches his God, “Disperse from my soul the twofold darkness into which I was born: sin and ignorance.”1 Teachers cultivate a scholar's moral and intellectual virtues. What a joyous thing it is for a child to win freedom, even piecemeal, from dishonesty and indolence! How glorious, when a scholar transcends the constraints of given time and place through engaging in mankind's "Great Conversation."
Perhaps I sound too idealistic for a profession marked by piles of repetitive grading, the fetching of loose-tooth boxes for unruly children, and red tape sprouting like trumpet vines. Truly, teaching is hearty labor. Yet to those who cry, “Idealist!”, I say this: the foxhole needs a vision of hope more than the coffeeshop.
Teachers clamor for silence all the time; nice work there, Sherlock! What’s your point?
But perhaps that is just the issue: we clamor. We plead, frenetically, for peace and quiet. Should by a miracle we achieve a modicum, we fill it with more activity. Busy hands won’t cause trouble.
Perhaps. Yet hands forever busy keep our eyes forever down. What if we looked up?
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." ~Antoine de Saint Exupéry
A robust intellectual life is characterized by frequent stillness. Its fruit, the beholding of Truth, reaches its ripe glory in silence. Strip down the classroom with ascetic fervor. What is it you want scholars to see or hear? Still yourself so as to look and listen yourself. Resist the temptation to fill.
If the formation of life-long scholars is our goal as teachers, we will never finish teaching. Wonderful! Delight in whole class periods wasted on one curious stanza, or one scientific curiosity, or one tragic episode of history. Those are the lessons that scholars remember.
From Thomas Aquinas’s “Prayer Before Study.”
First, let me say that when I pass your classroom, it always looks like your scholars are engaged. Second, I love your idealism. If teachers lose sight of that, they should probably seek out a new career. I agree that students need to "look up" from the busy work and really contemplate what they are learning. "Resist the temptation to fill"- great line and good advice.
“The network” should read this.