Giving Wings To Words
A Grateful Heart, Day 23
Language is all about creation and innovation. It has nothing to do with rote learning and sticking to the syllabus. It is about giving wings to words.
On Friday, the topic that I had assigned students to write on, was, ‘If I had a differently-abled brother/sister’ I was teaching a prose excerpt about Kim Peek, the autistic and super-intelligent man, who was the inspiration behind the splendid movie ‘Rain Man’. I needed to know what the students knew and felt about any kind of disability before I began the lesson. I needed to gauge what kind of soil my words would fall into: fertile, or impotent. Whether I would need more sun or irrigation for the seeds, my words. Would they sprout, grow, bloom…? Or would they shrivel and die before they were planted?
It is like digging for gold or searching for diamonds in an old disused mine, you understand when I assign an essay to write. Many students expressed their own cynicism, indifference, and complete ignorance, both in terms of knowledge and emotional depth.
There were some essays that were good.
And then there were those others, which caused my heart to race. Sensitive and understanding, mature and compassionate language, clothed in words so brilliantly used that I had to pause for breath and go through them once again because I couldn’t believe the evidence of my eyes. 19-year old students who think and express themselves in superlative prose, who want an inclusive life for anyone and everyone….I think there is still hope for, and in, the world.
And I was filled with gratitude again, for the good fortune of being an English teacher in a class full of teenagers.
Today is Day 23 of the Gratitude Challenge. This is my response to Ravyne Hawke’s November prompt, ‘A Grateful Heart’, for her brilliant publication, ‘Promptly Written.’
