I sit quietly, looking at the long list of assignments upon which the professor will be basing our grade. Thinking of all my other obligations, I find myself wondering if I’ll survive the next few months.

And I am pleased with that.

Being a teacher without being a student on a regular basis is about like being a mechanic who never drives. It’s one thing to “dish it out.” It’s another to take it.

To see the classroom from both sides of the desk is to ensure reasonable expectations from one’s own students.

So great is her love of motion that she’ll gladly sit and watch others dance. One of her favorite videos to watch is a clip about one young English lady’s ballet instruction, and from the first time she watched, she declared, “I’m a ballerina!”

Now, at close to four years old, she’s finally of the age that we can actually begin to make that reality.

A quick trip to the ballet supply store, a few phone calls, and we have a reluctant ballerina.

L is a cautious girl: she doesn’t just dive into this or that without concern. She is, in short, a worrier. And so on the first day of ballet, though she had been talking about it all week, she fretted that she might not like it after all.

Fear set in, and before long, she was declaring, “I don’t want to go.” No amount of cajoling could convince her.

The Opportunities-We-Never-Had dilemma set in: we never want to force her to participate in anything creative — where’s the joy in that? Yet we knew that if we could just get her there, just let her see the other girls dancing, that all would be well.

Finally, K simply declared that in order to cancel the lessons, L herself had to go with Mama to  cancel the lessons.

She ended up staying.

Saturday morning, before her second lesson, L was all smiles.

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A student in class today asked why we capitalize the first person singular subjective-case personal pronoun, I, but none of the other personal pronouns. “Why don’t we capitalize ‘he’ or ‘she’?” the curious young lady asked.

Indeed.

“I’ll look into that,” I replied, scribbling in my little notebook.

The New York Times offers an answer:

England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic,” “ich” or some variation thereof — before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form — the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries. (New York Times)

The whole article is quite interesting.

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There’s an old saying — advice to new teachers, really — that a teacher should never smile before Christmas. By the end of every school year, I’m so frustrated with my failures in dealing with this or that disruptive or disrespectful (somewhat synonymous in many ways) student that I promise myself that next year I will be a rock until Christmas. I will lay down the law and accept no compromise. I will be a drill instructor. I will pound them into submission and then convince them I’m a decent and nice guy.

Yet summer wanes, my planning progresses, and I inevitably turn my thoughts to what I want to do during the first days of school. And it occurs to me that I would most definitely not like to be beaten into submission as an initial experience with anyone. It would be hard to overcome the negative feelings such a first impression would create.

So when the first day of school arrives, I begin again to walk the ever-wiggling line between being a kind authoritative and devolving into a kind permissive teacher. Students might find the first overbearing at times but have a general faith — now and in the future — that all was done for their best; students find the second to be a favorite teacher while in middle school, only to look back on the teacher as one who was “nice but didn’t teach us much.”

Last week — the first week back — was the honeymoon period. The real test now begins. The sad thing is, I already have my eye on one or two that I believe will be major problems before the end of the first quarter. If I can work effectively with students and keep it only to one or two, it will be a great success.

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Many of those events later turned out to be insignificant, of little more importance than what one had for breakfast nine days ago.

Today’s is the most significant of my — and K’s — life.

When I reflect on the patience necessary for us to get married (a  non-Catholic American getting married in Poland requires only slightly less bureaucracy than starting a war or passing a stimulus bill) and the patience necessary to put up with my foolishness for six years, I realize how fortunate I am.

Six years – an awfully short time. Wars and debates have lasted much longer — and marriages. But when I look to the next six years, and the six years after that, and the six years after that (ad infinitum),

when I think of a time when my few remaining hairs have turned gray and migrated to my nose and ears, when my mind moves slowly and my body more so,

I will still have the most intelligent, beautiful, and thoughtful (among countless other superlatives) woman at my side. Perhaps only then will I truly understand the significance of our love.

Or maybe it’s to remain our ultimate mystery.