A day to mark with a white stone…

It’s my fourth year as a teacher. An old student, Charlene, freshman at St. Joseph’s, came to visit. We chatted briefly. A teacher’s day is so busy I can’t explain it. I was talking, setting out books, fixing desks, and putting up my PowerPoint for class, and trying to be attentive. As she was leaving, she said, as an aside, “By the way, my English professor asked me to bring in a copy of my favorite piece of literature and I brought in Gilgamesh. I thought of you and class.” I stopped and was stunned. This lovely, Latina young women, who struggled with many aspects of English, had actually heard me and kept it as a part of her. A few weeks ago, another student, Cindy, who used to make fun of me for being so boring, visited school. She’s at Columbia. She made the effort to stop and talk. She told me that they had finish the Iliad and were about to move onto the Odyssey, which I teach. I asked her what they discussed and she told me “Oh, you know nostos, kleos, the stuff we had in your class.” I was so pleased at her casualness, that “the stuff in your class” was old hat for a freshman at Columbia. I write this for the future, so the next time I quit teaching, which I do several times a year, I stop for a moment and think about legacy.

This ability to simply write for oneself and know that it will be there for the future is one happy, unintended benefit of learning about blogging.