If Only Every Day Was Like This

Today marked a momentous day in my life.  It was a day that I approached with a mix of excitement and fear.  It was a day that had been a long time coming, a day that I thought would never come.  That constant nagging thought, the long held desire of my heart, the incessant calling that would never leave me, that urge to fulfill a dream... Now there could no longer be any doubt, no more debate, no where else to run.  The day of discovery had finally dawned.  Today was my first day of placement for my school teaching experience.

As the children filed into the classroom, I sat on my chair at the front of the classroom and I began to wonder whether I could do it?  My fear began to rise.  I knew that at some point, I would have to get up and go and get involved, to engage with them, and to begin to get to know these strange alien creatures who I was going to be with every day for the next seven weeks.  How were they going to react to my presence?  Were they going to ask me questions that I would not be able to answer?  Would they make comments and backtalk me?  These children were older than I had ever expected to teach.  In the English state school system, primary school finishes at year 6 (age eleven) and at this point the children move up to secondary school.  Now I was faced with a mixed class of thirty two year 7s and 8s, who made up one class of a New Zealand intermediate school, which is classified here as primary.  When I had discovered this was my allocated class for the teaching experience I had been thrown, as it was far from my expectation. At 8:50am this morning, I was well and truly out of my comfort zone.  Theory is one thing, I love learning, I lap it up.  But practice?  That's a whole new ball game, it's what truly separates the men from the boys.  As my first manager once said to me, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man!"

I did get up and I did engage with the children.  The fight was only in the initial standing up because once I had done that, I really had nowhere else I could possibly go.  That was the moment when I knew I would be alright.  I didn't stand up because I thought that I should, I stood up because I wanted to engage with the students.  I was deeply curious and I wanted to help and to begin to answer my life's call.

Walking over to the first desk, I squatted down between two students, lowering myself to their level, and asked them how they were getting on and what were they were working on?  They replied and showed me their work.  We talked about it, I asked if they needed any help.  One of the students was working on a cryptic crossword and couldn't figure out some of the words.  We looked at it together and puzzled over it.  I could quickly deduce the answer but I didn't want to tell him, I needed him to find it for himself because that was the learning experience.  I asked him to look at how he had solved some of the other clues so that he could see the pattern, then I asked him to look again at the clue he was stuck on.  The light started to come on.  It was obvious.  He verbalised his thinking process and closed in on the answer whilst I waited patiently and nudged him to keep going with those thoughts, because they would lead him to the answer.  Bingo!  There it was.  So, we tried another one, same process again.  I knew that this was it.  This was what it was all about.

I moved on, spoke with other students, engaged with them on their work.  English literacy lesson came to a close and the classes split into academic levels for maths class.  My associate teacher took the higher level maths group and the topic for today's lesson was complex fraction multiplication.  The students were set some examples to work through and I got up and went to visit the desks.  The first student I talked with was having some problems, so we worked through one together.  He got it.  I moved on and found another.  She got it too.  I was making a difference.  The teacher put up a really tough one for them all to work on.  I was with one of the students who was having some problems with it.  We worked it through together and although I was 99.9% sure of the answer we had, that 0.1% remained because it had worked differently from the others, not following the same pattern.  I sat down and crossed my fingers that when the answer came I had it right because I couldn't face knowing that I had taken a student down a wrong turn.  And when the answer came and with some relief I saw that I had been right, the student got up and walked over and high-fived me!  What a moment.

The rest of the day was similar.  I kept making tours of the class, talking to the children, helping where I could or discussing their work with them.  My high-five guy kept giving me a thumbs up during the afternoon.  It seemed that he was extremely happy with our maths problem solving and I think because we also talked about books (he's an avid reader). I used the time to make observations, to try to learn names, to figure out how each student ticked.  

At the end of the day, as they were filing out, the high-five guy came over to me.  "Thank you for the help today Mr Smith.  You're really interesting to talk with."  I was almost speechless.  I didn't expect this at all but I sure did appreciate.  "You're so welcome", I replied, "See you in class tomorrow."  What an end to my first day.  These are the kind of days that remain with you for the rest of your life.  I'll never again experience another first day of teaching experience, but I know that getting through has been truly significant and a momentous occasion.  I'm sure that not every day is going to be like this.  There are going to be some tough days ahead and some frustrating moments to come.  For now though, I can look back on my first day and smile.  Maybe not everyday will be like this but as long as I follow my heart, then I know that they are going to come pretty close.

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The End Is Only The Beginning

The end is really only the beginning.  That's certainly one way to look at it.  As one moment ends, we find ourselves already in the midst of another.  Countless millions of moments that together make up a life story.  One moment is all it takes to change the world, to alter the path of destiny.  One moment, one opportunity, one life.  It always comes down to that one single moment, a point at which your future is being decided, even if you are not aware of the consequences that surround you, of the swirling mass of possibilities that are lining up, taking order, falling into place.  And on we go, oblivious, until with hindsight, we look back down the road, and there, basking in all its glory, finally revealed to even the most blinkered of eyes, is that one pivotal moment that shook your world, that altered the course of your destiny and that brought you to the point at which you are now.  Sitting in a cafe in a seaside town in England, on a cold, wet, and dreary December day, staring out of the window at all of the activity in the street outside.

My time in Costa Rica has ended.  In fact, it was over on 5 December, as the plane hurtled down the runway of San Jose airport, as the wings lifted with the air velocity and pressure differential, and the wheels touched Costa Rican tarmac for the last time that day.  Airborne and with it, my future changed, it shifted.  Plans that had been made started to become a reality, thoughts, electronic pulses stored in my brain, turned into tangible occurrences.  This journey across the Caribbean and Atlantic oceans represented both an ending and a beginning.  This is life.

In death comes life.  Perhaps, with it being the day before Christmas, my thoughts turn to Jesus, which makes me think of the Resurrection.  "In death, I become life." (I just Googled that phrase in the belief that someone must have said it before, but my search brings forth no such findings.  So, I am taking it as my own creation.)  In other words, I must die before life comes again.  That is the way of our dreams.  We realise one dream and that dream must end before another can come to fruition. 

I have died many times in my life, I have experienced many endings.  With each cycle, I have changed, perhaps imperceptibly so, but I know that the person who began this odyssey into the unknown is not the same person who sits here in this cafe today.  How could I be?  I have seen and experienced too much.  I have opened myself up, I have given myself over to life, to the possibilities of something more, I have witnessed miracles, known people and cultures, suffered, cried, loved, and laughed.  Every thing and every person I have ever had contact with is some how now inside of me.  Maybe this is how we grow as people?  We internalise everything with which we come into contact and every emotion with which we experience.  We take a part of it all, a part of life and we bring that within.  At the same time, we are imparting something of ourselves to each person, to each experience.  Our soul is nourished and in turn nourishes those who we meet.  With each experience, we leave behind a trace of our soul, a signature that lasts an eternity, intrinsically linked to the time, to the place and to the participants.

Maybe what I am talking about today is the soul of life.  What if all of life shared a single soul?  One elemental force that linked every thing to every thing else.  People, animals, birds, fish, trees, shrubs, grasses, oceans, rivers, rocks, mountains, sand, clouds, rain, sun, moon, stars, air, Earth.  It's all of life in perfect balance, the soul is one, it is whole.  It leads me to something I have written before, "I am in everything and everything is in me."  I am in no doubt that when Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), what he was referring to was that every single one of us has the power within us.  In the heart lies the truth.  In the heart lies the way.  In the heart lies the life.  It is in our hearts that the power to become all that we were born to be is to be found.

Well, as always, I begin to write, unsure of where I will go and something always comes.  The flow of the mind is often a surprise to me and that is why I love to sit in a cafe and write.  This will probably be my last post of 2013 and I look forward to continuing the journey in 2014.  I hope that you will stay with me as we each travel down our own unique path.  It all begins again on 1 January. A turning of the page. A new chapter to be written.  An ending and a beginning.

Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to you all.

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