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| TANGLED! |
My blogs these days seem much of a
piece – all about school. But that is
where my head is and where I am urging my heart to follow.
Each day brings something new, a
high, a low and an in-between. A child who will smile, a child who will frown, a child who will be
more stubborn than a mule. The
mule I would ignore. The child stays with me even after the school day is
done. What could I / should I have done
differently? Why was that one child so determined to challenge authority? And why do I have to keep laying down the
law? A neat, tidy, orderly and silent
classroom seems so at odds with lively, squirming children!! But how lovely is the noiseless room, with
minds engaged and thoughts abloom (even if they are all about getting even with
the teacher!).
Singing class seems to be more about
letting off steam than learning the tonic
solfa and oh how they love their action songs. Even
the ‘big’ girls!! When they’re happy, they really show it from the clapping, to
the stomping and the screaming. Next
week, I’m planning on teaching them homemade percussion: if noise appeals then
why not go the whole way? (A variation on ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’!) I remember the fun we had, as children,
tapping teaspoons, shaking little boxes filled with rice or hard grain and
blowing through combs covered with tissue paper. If you can think up any more impromptu ‘instruments’,
do let me know. (We also tapped
teaspoons on the rims of glasses of water filled to different levels – when you
got it right, you created the sweetest sound.
But we are too many, and glass and water can be so accident prone.)
And then there’s the crochet which
is more ‘is not’ than ‘is’. Teaching 60
plus students to simultaneously put hook to wool and turn out identical perfect
stitches is the stuff of movies and dreams.
The variations on a stitch that I encounter are more the stuff of
nightmares. Perseverance is a virtue
that both teacher and student need and I’m resolute, persistent, unrelenting,
firm about reaching the goal!!
But there are the diversions. One student managed to get a factory wound
perfect ball of wool into an even more perfect tangle. ‘Miss,’ she wailed, ‘HELP!’ I brought the yarn home and spent the best
part of an hour following one end till it met the other and I had, once more, a
well wound ball of yarn. It was a happy
shade of yellow and while hands were busy, my mind dwelt on the weeks gone by. Sitting
and untangling the thread was somehow peaceful and yes, amusing! And the student’s joyful whoop, ‘THANK YOU”
was more than enough reward.
Though I am still bemused by where I
find myself, I have stopped wondering about the path, no matter how tangled. Like
Theseus, I hold one end of the thread in my hands, but I know that the other
end is firmly in God’s clasp. And when
the ends meet, I will be a perfectly wound ‘yarn’. (Pun intended!)
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