Since 1:45 this afternoon, I've been focusing on my writing students' papers and progress in class. Yes, it's been sporadic, so it's not been a whole 12 hours straight of calculating and essay commentary. After all, I had to catch up on a couple of hours of sleep that I lost yesterday in the midst of throwing a sleepover birthday for my ten-year-old (which could be a whole post of its own).
By midnight, I was completely wrecked in spirit by this class. They're sucking the life out of me this semester by their overt disinterest in learning anything. Turn in homework? No. Work through the online lab component? No. Write an essay without 42 glaring grammar errors? Impossible. I've lost my mind over it, so I got in bed. Then I decided to write after the nagging thoughts wouldn't leave me alone.
Ultimately I've come to the realization that students will do "just enough" to get by. I just don't operate that way. I don't find it worth the trouble. I complained to M, "What is the point of half-ass doing something? It's a waste of time!" If you don't do it the way you are capable of doing it, spend the time elsewhere (doing something you'd get something out of). For example, I asked one of my more intelligible students to rewrite his 5 paragraph essay based upon my comments of his first draft. FIVE paragraphs. He whined and complained, asking if he could just make the edits on the page rather than rewrite it. Another student asked, "Since I already received a passing score on one of my 3 required essays, I don't really have to write anymore, do I?" These students are going through the paces without paying any attention to the wisdom and growth that comes with applying themselves and.... actually learning something.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change."
I see the connection he makes to the monotony.
I get the repetitious choreography of life's dance, but I still enjoy the movement. It's fascinating to me that although each day could be the same, there's a way of looking at the world that makes one search out the differences. Not only search them out, but also being attentive to what those difference are trying to tell us. The closer I listen, the more in tune I feel that what I'm doing is happening as it should.
This type of life comes from learning what it means to observe and live in a world, not of perfection but of practice. When we do yoga, we call it our "practice." No one perfects yoga, nor does one perfect life. But we should actively, always mindfully, practice. Life is too short to do "just enough."
No comments:
Post a Comment