typical

the above link is the epitome of typical indo road. footage from a trip to the ocean. beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

i'll go to ethiopia in two weeks. blessed, sweet communion and giggling over home-spun scarves -- no, no, i mean really spun-by-hand-at-home scarves -- and sharing of stories about the joys and aches of teaching at an int'l school... such will be the stuff I look forward to, as well as finally planting feet on a continent i've mooned over for years. i imagine the first thing i'll do upon arriving at said friend's homestead is find a place to strip off the shoes & socks and dig my toenails into the dirt.

i facilitated a socratic seminar yesterday with my grade 7 students. when i teach them a terse, tight-lipped, squeezed-lungs feeling wells up deep in my guts. there is such a visible tension in them (amidst growth) between self-control and whimsical un-filtered compulsions. i feel like i'm pushing a giant sieve onto a room full of octopuses (octopi?): their thoughts and laughter and homework and questions flinging themselves all around my classroom like tentacles while i desperately attempt to squelch the inappropriate and nourish the appropriate. if tools were needed, in one hand would be a machete and the other sheep shit (as my gardener likes to term fertilizer - 'oh, yeah, we need some sheep shit for your lawn.' - wha? ok, ya, dung. i chalk it up to the language barrier.). Anyway, amidst this pruning and weeding and nurturing, I allow and even create many moments of un-comfortability for them in class - just for the purpose of stretching them. In a socratic seminar it means that I often act like the awkward silences don't exist, and i don't recognize their pleading-eyed 'ma'am, I don't know what to say.' Because I want that they learn to shake off their gangly-limbed strange-ness in my safe classroom so that they can let the good ideas surface and learn to wait for the moments of 'aha.' And it happened yesterday. A group of awkward, giggling, silent-at-all-the-wrong-time seventh-graders floundered through the moment until finally they touched the heart of the matter. and question by question by mounting question by -now rapid-fire question- they explored the cosmic battle between good and evil and turned their minds right around to Creator God. it was beautiful.

and i wouldn't trade the difficulty of it for all the self-assured twelfth-graders in the world. (though, for their own reasons, and for the record, i love them too.)