I'm a Teacher!!! (Almost)

I still can't BELIEVE that I'm a teacher . . . almost! I can't believe that soon, I'm going to have my own classroom . . .

That I'm going to get to empower other people to THINK, to BECOME, to DISCOVER . . .
That I get to invite them into the worlds of Dickens, Steinbeck, Orwell, Doestovsky, Faulkner, Chekhov, Shakespeare . . . and so many others! Oh, the worlds they don't even know EXIST yet!

Shakespeare . . . I can't believe that I get to teach SHAKESPEARE! It's true; my cooperating teacher Elizabeth Whitfield and I are meeting on Dec. 17th to plan out units on Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," and Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar!!" Yes, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears . . . I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him . . ." "Brutus was an honorable man . . . " "Et tu, Brutus?" "But Caesar was ambitious . . . "

I love literature . . . where do I even begin? I look back over my life, and the friends that I have met in the novels of these great authors have shaped and molded my life more deeply than many of the people that I speak to and shake hands with. Their sacrifice, their honor, their faithfulness, their passion . . . their betrayal and hurt and confusion.

What an honor to invite others to meet these characters . . . and to ask them to analyze and create, to decide for themselves what they think about justice, about peace and war, about love and trust, about sacrifice. There is a freedom in the beauty of literature that gives me the space (and the responsibility) to invest in the minds and in the hearts of my students TRUTH. To allow them to see the world from a different perspective: to tear apart words and speech and language and structure, and find at the bottom of the barrel the naked beauty that remains.

And to reform that into words of their own. Their own story, their own beliefs. Beauty of Christ, reign supreme in my classroom . . . wherever and whatever I teach, for all time!