teaching – Mysteries and Manners

7 Quick Takes Friday (4/4/14)

April 4, 2014

-1-

My students are finishing up Julius Caesar and preparing for their speech recitations on Monday. That’s right – they have to memorize a speech from the play and deliver it to the class. The minimum requirement (for a C grade on that particular section of the rubric) is 10 lines. But a few of them are tackling Mark Antony’s entire speech, or Brutus’, or Cassius’ manipulative tirade back in Act 1.

Here’s one of the best speeches ever, performed by one of the best actors ever – Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in Act 3, Scene 2:

Here’s another version we looked at in class that shows a much more emotional Mark Antony. This Mark Antony seems genuinely upset that Caesar has been murdered. He is a lot more sympathetic and seems a lot less sneaky than Marlon Brando’s version:

-2-

Funny story.

So when I first showed the second video by the Royal Shakespeare Company (above) to my classes, my 6th hour class started whispering and laughing.

It didn’t take more than 2 seconds to figure out what was amusing them so much.

I rolled my eyes and said to them – “Okay, the cast is black. Get over it, people.”

“Ms. Shea, are you showing us this version because we’re your ‘black’ class?” one of my black students asked. Everyone laughed, including me.

“No, I’ve been showing this version to all my classes today.”

It’s strange to me. The school I teach at now is very diverse, and so race is an issue that people laugh about more than anything else. I had to correct a student a few weeks ago for pretending to be a slave and bowing before her white master (she was black, her friend was white). But the issue seems so distant to many of my students here. They don’t know why I take it so seriously. “Come on, Ms. Shea. We’re just kidding.”

It’s like they think racism doesn’t exist anymore.

-3-

In Louisiana, my students were not laughing when we were discussing racism in Huckleberry Finn, and whether or not they thought it was okay for Mark Twain to repeatedly employ the “N” word. They were very divided about the issue. And some of them got angry. And it was uncomfortable because it’s something that continually brims beneath the surface but no one ever wants to talk about.

Jim_and_ghost_huck_finn — source: wikipedia A less-than-favorable portrayal of Jim.

Back in liberal, middle class Boston I was taught that race doesn’t–or shouldn’t–matter.

But then I became a teacher and have realized that it does matter, whether we like it or not.

This may be controversial of me to say, but I’m going to say it anyway:

In my experience I have found that students who don’t know how to “speak white” and “talk white” are at a huge disadvantage. English is, like it or not, a white man’s language. It has evolved and changed over time, certainly, and will continue to do so. But as of right now, my Mexican students, black students, foreign students from Korea and Poland and Argentina and various other parts of the world will always struggle in school if they do not learn how to “speak white” and “talk white.” As an English teacher, it’s not just my job to teach all my students correct grammar and good writing habits. I also have to teach them the rules of the game, whether or not we really like the rules.

Some of my non-white students (both here and in Louisiana) know how to negotiate these boundaries and play the game from both sides. But the ones that don’t know how, or refuse to accommodate, tend to really struggle in school. They don’t speak “white English” at home or with their friends, and therefore they have difficulty using it at school.

I mean, I guess I do believe there is such a thing as “proper English,” but I am well-aware it is far more fluid and arbitrary than a lot of people think it is.

-4-

Awesome video on English and it’s development:

-5-

A really fascinating talk by Pope Francis on authentic prayer: “Real prayer is courageous, frank dialogue with God” via Catholic News Agency.

The Pope went on to express how when Moses prayed, he did so freely, courageously and with insistence, stating that prayer ought to be a “negotiation with God” to which we bring our “arguments.”

[…]

Drawing attention to how the scripture passaged describes Moses as speaking to God “face to face, like a friend,” the pontiff observed “This is how prayer should be: free, insistent, with debate, and should also scold “the Lord a little: ‘But, you promised me this, and you haven’t done it…’”

“Open the heart to this prayer,” he implored of those in attendance, stating that after his encounter with God “Moses came down from the mountain invigorated: ‘I have known the Lord more.’” (Catholic News Agency)

Wow. Some theologians and experts on spirituality might be rather uncomfortable with “scolding” the Lord and “arguing” or even “negotiating” with Him.

And yet I think Francis is right. Prayer must be honest. Too often I think we (Catholics in particular) dress up our prayers with pieties that aren’t really true. I would venture to say it is better to pray “Lord, I don’t feel like doing your Will right now. Help me to want to. But I don’t feel like it” than to pray “Lord, thy will be done” inauthentically.

On the other hand, one of the reasons we pray “The Our Father” is so that our desires can be formed and shaped by Jesus’ words. We want to be able to say “Thy will be done” with all of our hearts.

-6-

Via Leah Libresco at Unequally Yoked: “every story Jesus tells and enacts is really a story about the Mass:”

The Healing of the Deaf-Mute Man. I love this story, because it summarizes the entire Gospel. Jesus heals us, and says Ephphatha, be open. Be open! Be open to grace. Be open to the Gospel. (By the way, the grace of God opens us, but then it’s up to us to cooperate with that grace. #CatholicPitches) What else happens? Jesus puts his saliva on the man’s lips and tongue. What an incredible gesture! I can’t ever shake that image. Jesus and the deaf-mute man, face to face. Jesus licking his fingers and putting his saliva on him. Imagine Jesus Christ, the Lord, touching your lips so tenderly. It’s a kiss. In some ways, it’s even more intimate than a kiss. He’s the Word of God! He doesn’t need to mess around with saliva to heal a deaf-mute man. But he wants to! It’s communion. Jesus puts His body on the man’s tongue. That’s what opens him. He receives the Body of Christ.

The Emmaus Pilgrims. This is the most striking one. The story of the Emmaus Pilgrims is one of my favorite from the entire Bible. Are we not all the Emmaus Pilgrims, wandering around, totally clueless, with Jesus walking on our side, and us not noticing Him? That’s the superficial (and true) meaning of that story. The other superficial (and true) meaning of that story is that, yes, Jesus of Nazareth really did bodily rise from the dead–people saw it. But what is the story of the Emmaus Pilgrims? What is its structure, its nature? It’s a Mass! It follows the Order of the Mass. First the Pilgrims hear Scripture, and expository preaching on Scripture. Then they come to a table, for what? The Eucharist! Jesus blesses the bread and the wine, and that’s when their eyes are opened. What just happened? Christ the High Priest performed the sacrament of the Eucharist! You just got ephphatha’d, bro. (“Everything in the Gospels is About the Mass”)

-7-

Also via Leah Libresco, but I really couldn’t resist posting this one:

“A Teaching Philosophy I am Not Ashamed Of” at Math and Bad Drawings

I’ve always dreaded being asked for my “teaching philosophy.”

For years, I gave nonsense or scattershot answers. “Logic and critical thinking are paramount.” “I care more about conceptual understanding than computational skill.” “A balanced, student-centered approach is always best.” “We buzzword to buzzword, not for the buzzword, but for the buzzword.” At best, each of my disjointed half-theories captured only a piece of the puzzle.

Worse still, none of my replies explained why I devote so much class time to plain old practice. If I was such an enlightened liberal educator, why did I assign repetitive computations for homework? On the other hand, if I was a traditionalist at heart, why did I fall head-over-heels for high-minded progressive rhetoric? Was I an old-school wolf, a new-school lamb, or some strange chimera? (Math With Bad Drawings)

Hm.

I wonder what I would say my “teaching philosophy” is…

Experience as Knowledge

September 24, 2013

I just started a new unit with my students on Mythology AND Short Stories. Usually these genres are studied separately, but I thought it would be cool to discover what is most essential about human storytelling by looking at the chronological extremes — the most ancient human stories and the most recent ones. Why do we tell stories, anyway?

Before diving into our first myth as a class — the story of Prometheus — we did a “fishbowl discussion” in which we explored four main ideas. For bell work, my kids had to respond to these ideas (“I agree / disagree and this is why…”) and so they were able to gather their thoughts before the conversation began.

1. The best way to learn is through experience.

2. In the end, virtue is always rewarded.

3. To understand good, one must understand evil.

4. The purpose of the story is to entertain.

Here are the results:

1. Most of my students (unsurprisingly) agreed with this statement.

2. We actually skipped over this one, but I’m hoping we will talk about it later.

3. Again, unsurprisingly, most of my students agreed with this one too. Some of them went even so far as to claim, “Without good, there can be no evil; and without evil, there can be no good. Good and evil need each other.” (I was slowly dying inside, but I guess they are just in high school).

4. They were more divided on this one. Apparently they learned last year that stories/written works generally have three possible purposes: 1) to entertain 2) to inform and 3) to persuade. Their responses to this statement were therefore more nuanced, for the most part.

knowledge-is-experience-copy — source: brandigirlblog.com

I think #1 and #3 really go together. Even when I proffered a more extreme example in my honors class – “Well, if you need to understand evil in order to understand good, does that mean that a sinner knows more about goodness than a saint does? Like, for example, Hitler knows more about good and evil than St. Therese does?”

Surprisingly (and somewhat disturbingly), a lot of my kids said yes. Because to them, knowledge = experience. If you haven’t experienced something yourself, how can you possibly know what it is?

For my honors class I paraphrased this statement by C. S. Lewis in response:

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist. (Lewis, Mere Christianity)

Well, the “lie” may be “obvious” to Lewis, but it is certainly not obvious to most of the students I teach. I think a few of them saw what I (or rather, Lewis) was getting at, but not all of them.

What’s rather disturbing is that the idea that experience is the best teacher is so ingrained in all of us. There is, of course, a lot of truth to it — that’s why we have all these cliches about learning from your mistakes and walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. But it’s also the source of some big problems.

The cult of experience as knowledge, when taken to its extreme (as it usually is these days), ends up ignoring all other types of knowing or disregarding them.

“You’re not me! You don’t know what it’s like to be me!”

Although that is true, that does not necessarily mean another person cannot have some insight into your condition. Experience as knowledge often disregards sympathy. No, I do not know exactly how you feel, but I can put myself in your place imaginatively – without actually having to do what you are doing.

How many times did I experience this (see what I did there?) as a high school student? So many of my friends/acquaintances did not want to take me seriously because I hadn’t “experienced” enough things. I did not drink or smoke or have sex, therefore (they concluded) I could not possibly understand what they were going through.

And although in some sense that is true, in another way it is a lie –

The same lie that the snake told Adam and Eve in the garden.

For so many of us, mere “witness” or “sympathy” or “word” is not enough. The only thing (we say) we will listen to is Experience.

“Ah, but did God say ye may not eat of that tree? It’s only because He doesn’t want you to be as powerful as He is, and to know (i.e. experience) good and evil! Come on… taste and see for yourself…”

And so, because Eve became enamored of Experience – the Knowledge of Good and Evil – she hate the fruit and gave it to her husband.

Genesis tells us that indeed they learned something – “their eyes were opened” and “they saw that they were naked.”

But they also lost something – knowledge of a profound intimacy with God.

Emerson — source: squareone-learning.com

Which is why faith is so difficult for us now – whether it’s having faith in another person or in God. We think we need to EXPERIENCE God before we will believe in Him.

Even certain (more modern) branches of Christianity fall into this trap. Faith itself becomes so much of an “experience” that they can even tell you the time and place it first happened. I know God is real because I have experienced Him.

But does that mean that those who *have not experienced* God, in the popular sense, are therefore off the hook?

One last thought:

God seems to get our whole need for experience thing. After all, He decided the best way to save us would be to *experience* being human for Himself – even though, being God and omniscient, He already knew what it was like. And furthermore, Jesus was able to reveal the Father to us because He Himself had *experienced* the Father from all eternity:

“No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him” (Matthew 11:27).

“No one has ever seen God; only the Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known” (John 1:18).

But the problem is, we do not trust Jesus’ experience. Nor do we trust the experience of the apostles who experienced Him. Nor the disciples of the apostles who experienced them. Nor the experience of the ones who came after that… and so on. Because experience, at this point, has turned into witness. And witness means believing what someone else says, whether or not you have directly experienced what they are telling you for yourself.

Like Thomas, we won’t believe our friends when they tell us, “He is Risen!” Nope, we have to put our fingers in His hands and side in order to believe.

Or we think we have to taste the fruit in order to have “knowledge of good and evil.”

But “bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in” (Lewis).

First Days of School!

August 28, 2013

english-teacher — Source: scaryforkids.com
… not sure why this picture is from this website

I do not have much time to write, but I wanted to give you a quick update on my first few days of school.

First of all, I’m loving it. This is such a wonderful school. The students are so polite and kind, and everyone has been so welcoming to me. Plus, not having FOUR preps and SIX classes a day (with an “off” period usually reserved for substituting) is amazing. I have two “off” or “prep” periods! And I get to use them! And I am especially blessed because I only have 1 prep (or 1 and a 1/2 if you count my Honors class separately), and thus I have a lot more time to preparing lessons and giving more frequent feedback on assignments. It’s still a lot of work, and I am still very exhausted after most days, but it makes me wonder how I ever got through my first two years of teaching.

Second of all, I feel like this:

Okay, my kids are a bit bigger. And I wasn’t this sweet the first day of school – in fact, I hear I was kind of scary. But that’s how I felt on the INSIDE.

Third of all, I devoted my first week of class to procedures and what Carol Dweck class “Growth Mindset.” Basically, her idea is HOW we view our own intelligence AFFECTS how we are able (or not able) to use our intelligence.

For example, if you believe that intelligence is static, that you were born smart or born not-so-smart, that belief has certain behavior consequences. On the other hand, if you believe intelligence is dynamic, that it can grow and be shaped over time, that belief also has consequences.

Another example: saying things like “I am an A student” or “I am a C student” means you probably have a fixed mindset. You believe intelligence is innate and remains basically the same throughout your life. This can have serious consequences for both the “A students” and the “C students.”

So, my first bell work assignment was a survey that students took that helped them analyze their own views of intelligence. Throughout the week, we talked about the results and what they mean.

Here’s a great visual chart I gave my kids to look at:

dweck_mindset — Source: qedfoundation.org

They got pretty excited about this topic, because even though they (and all of us) have heard the “work harder” mantra and the “practice makes perfect” cliche, they had not heard these ideas presented in such a new and well-researched way. And honestly, Dweck shows us how just “working harder” is not enough. If you’re interested in these ideas too, check out this awesome website on Mindset. Read it with an open mind (pun intended). Honestly, when I first started reading about Carol Dweck’s studies in my educational psychology class, I was rather skeptical because I thought it was going to be more bland “self-esteem” stuff… but actually, learned a lot about myself and my own approaches to success and failure.

Fourth of all, this is what my Labor Day Weekend Forecast looks like:

ManInMiddleOfPaperStacks — Source: caitlintucker.com

Very busy, with a 100% chance of a grading downpour, a 95% chance of exhaustion, and a small but rather alarming 10% chance of drowning in papers.

My Mouth is Dry

August 9, 2013

I have moved to Denver!

I am sitting in my new classroom, imagining the faces that will occupy the empty desks, the colors I will use to mitigate the overwhelming whiteness of the walls, the procedures I intend to begin practicing with them on day one…

…and my mouth is dry.

It will probably feel a whole lot dryer on the first day when I have to speak to my new students (whom, I hear, have been informed that I am a very hard-core scary teacher by my ACE predecessor).

Or the first time a student doesn’t follow directions, and I have to administer a consequence.

Or that first parent phone-call I make… even though I plan on the first one being very positive–a reaching out and introducing myself to all the parents before they know what hit ’em .

Or that first summer reading assignment I hand back… their first taste of my high expectations.

But right now, sitting here, typing and imagining and predicting, my mouth is dry.

They tell you when you move to Denver, you should drink a lot of water. Something about the high altitude and the climate makes dehydration pretty common, especially for newcomers. So I’ve been carrying a water bottle everywhere I go.

And my mouth is still dry.

When I was in Louisiana, sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe because of all the moisture in the air. Every time it rained, the water flooded the streets because it had nowhere to go — I guess the ground was saturated already.

Richard Wilbur’s beautiful poem, “Grasse: The Olive Trees,” was floating in my waterlogged thoughts all the time these past two years:

Here luxury’s the common lot. The light

Lies on the rain-pocked rocks like yellow wool

And around the rocks the soil is rusty bright

From too much wealth of water, so that the grass

Mashes under the foot, and all is full

Of heat and juice and a heavy jammed excess.

If that ain’t Louisiana, I don’t know what is.

Funny, because Wilbur is from Massachusetts like me, and lives a couple of hours away from where I grew up. Apparently the South made a big impression on him though (as it has with me). Look at how beautifully he describes the stillness, brought about by the thick heat. I was warned that people in the South walk more slowly, and talk more slowly. Sometimes, during my first year teaching, my kids would ask me to slow down. And it makes perfect sense that they think we rush around so quickly:

Whatever moves moves with the slow complete
Gestures of statuary. Flower smells
Are set in the golden day, and shelled in heat,
Pine and columnar cypress stand. The palm
Sinks its combs in the sky. The whole South swells
To a soft rigor, a rich and crowded calm.

And then, to my Northern delight, Wilbur notices something that protests the South, and all it’s sticky hot sweetness. And, to my even greater delight, it’s an olive tree — evoking images of that golden time I spent in Italy during college, biblical images, this whole idea of thirst….

Only the olive contradicts. My eye,
Traveling slopes of rust and green, arrests
And rests from plenitude where olives lie
Like clouds of doubt against the earth’s array.
Their faint disheveled foliage divests
The sunlight of its color and its sway.

Take a look at this olive tree, and then reread that stanza again:

Yup. It “contradicts” the landscape, the richness, the “excess.” The olive tree is still thirsty, for all of that water and warm sunshine.

But then this, as well:

Not that the olive spurns the sun; its leaves
Scatter and point to every part of the sky,
Like famished fingers waving. Brilliance weaves
And sombers down among them, and among
The anxious silver branches, down to the dry
And tsisted tgrunk, by rooted hunger wrung.

And then he ends his poem, in this incomparably beautiful way, gently evoking images that make you thirsty too, but perhaps for something else:

Even when seen from near, the olive shows
A hue of far away. Perhaps for this
The dove brought olive back, a tree which grows
Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,
And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess,
Teaches the South it is not paradise.

And you think of Noah in that sea of water, after that great excess of the great flood, searching the horizon for the little dove he had sent away. And eventually the dove comes back… bearing an olive branch, and the hope of dry land. (Genesis 8:11)

The South indeed “is not paradise,” but neither is Colorado, as beautiful as it is. I can’t really imagine two places more different from one another than Colorado and Louisiana, but here they are, juxtaposed, and here am I in the middle of them, missing the humidity but loving the clearer air.

And my mouth is dry, it seems no matter how much water I drink.

Or, I guess, no matter where I go.

Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:13-15)

Notes from my First Year of Teaching

April 1, 2013

Here are excerpts from notes I wrote during my first full year of teaching (last year).

1. circa September 2011

“Come see Ms. Shea! Come see!”

I remembered that the other ACE teachers at my high school in rural LA had mentioned this verbal phenomenon to me before my first day of school. Instead of saying “Could you come and look at this, Ms. Shea?” or “I need to show you something, Ms. Shea,” or even “I have a question, Ms. Shea,” my sophomores, juniors and seniors consistently say, “Come see!” –even if they don’t actually want to show me something.

As I remember, the theme of the opening April ACE retreat was the invitation of Christ – “Come and see” (John1:39). Little did I know then how often I would hear that invitation in the classroom from my students! I am not sure if this phrase is particular to the local area or to all of Louisiana, but I think it is a daily gift that reminds me of my purpose as an ACE teacher.

I came to Louisiana with a lot of ideas about what it would be like—small, rural Southern towns conjure up a lot of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor-esque images for northern English majors like me. Seeing the ramshackle houses on cinder blocks alongside my school, the black and white neighborhoods distinctly separated by streets, the bizarre Daiquiris drive-through stations, the flat, steamy landscape rich with both sugarcane and humidity was enough to bewilder me the first few days and to make me feel further from my own cultural comfort zone than ever. But one of the most important things I am discovering, with the help of my students, is the simple necessity to come and see—to put aside whatever cultural preconceptions might hinder me from really appreciating this strange, beautiful place and my strange, beautiful students.

2. circa October 2011

“She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.” (Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor)

This quote may seem rather discouraging to teachers but I think it describes with painful accuracy the challenge of getting students to take responsibility for their own learning. I have found myself falling into the trap of doing most of the talking, most of the working, most of the thinking in the classroom—and if I continue I will not only burn myself out, I will also have failed to engage my students.

Part of this failure of engaging and providing feedback for my students seems to be the direct results of my efforts find realistic and efficient ways to do both. I have started to create guided notes for my students so that during direct instruction they don’t just sit and listen passively or (on the opposite end of the spectrum) try to copy down everything from a power point presentation or lecture. Giving them a concrete task to accomplish during direct instruction helps engage them and even encourages their participation since they know what information they need to discover. However, the drawback to these guided notes is that students tend to want to listen only for the right “answer” so that they can copy it down, rather than ask intelligent questions and engage the subject more for its own sake. I have found that students are so focused on getting the right answer that they are not concerned with learning how to think critically and independently—I want to find ways to push them toward that. This is very difficult, however, since many of my students resent the ways that I try to push and challenge them already.

[…] But honestly, I feel overwhelmed standing in front of so many students. Sometimes I feel like I can really see the ones who are struggling or who are disengaged, but I don’t feel as though I have the time or energy to find a way to bring them back in since I feel like I am barely making it through lesson plans. I feel frustrated because I know there are so many things I could be doing better, or so many other “methods” I could try to help my students, but at the same time I still feel like I am in survival mode and I am just trying to get through the day. Unfortunately, I am afraid that this sense of being totally overwhelmed is both caused by and starting to result in the students working less and me working more.

But as O’Connor says, “To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.” Somehow, I need to set high expectations for myself and for my students while at the same time realizing that teaching is much more about love and consistency than it is about visible success.

3. circa December 2011

Student A said to me a couple of weeks ago, “Ms. Shea, at first I thought you were really scary. You were so serious! But actually you’re very nice.”

I smiled and silently remembered that the reason I looked so serious all the time the first four or five weeks was because I felt sick every morning from being so nervous. Gradually, however, as I got to know the students I found myself smiling more and engaging in conversation with them—I found myself sharing, every once in a while, a little bit about my own past experiences. The fact that I have a second-degree black belt and used to teach marital arts received a particularly enthusiastic (albeit slightly apprehensive) response.

Sharing myself with my students at times (I am still rather shy and hesitant about this) I think has helped them feel more comfortable with me and more willing to take risks in the classroom—good risks, like volunteering when no other hands are raised, or arguing for an unpopular perspective. I think that knowing me better has even helped the students who I sometimes have to keep after class—a part of them sees that I am a real person with a real history; that I care about them, and that my “real” black-belt, Red Sox fan, Texan and twin-sister self is not separate from my identity as the teacher and authority figure.

The wonderful thing about this is that the sacramental view of reality—God communicating Himself to us through created things in tangible, sometimes even mundane ways—means that these simple acts of mutual trust are potentially vehicles of His grace. Occasionally I even see the fruit of this grace—like when Student B was leading prayer and suggested that all of us mention something that we would really like to improve in our lives. The honest and humble responses of each student created a special moment of shared trust and even vulnerability—the answers ranged from “patience” to “improving my attitude at school.” It was a little moment, but I think it really reflected the respect that the members of the class had developed for one another.

4. circa June 2012 (coming full circle)

“Come see, Ms. Shea! Come see!”

This is the second or third time I have written a reflection about this phrase in my spiritual life, but ever since I joined ACE it keeps coming up! As the 12 Steps of ACE spirituality indicate, this is the first invitation of Christ to his disciples in the Gospel of John—“Where are you staying?” “Come, and you will see!” It is also the first invitation of Christ to all of us ACE teachers on April retreat. There’s a beautiful Providence at work in the fact that “come see” is a daily phrase of my students in rural Louisiana. It can mean many things—but for my students, it usually is their way of saying “I need you!” So it has always been very moving and strange for me to hear similar words coming from the mouth of Christ: “Come and see, I need you.”

In the computer lab as I move across the room from student to student, trying to encourage them and push them along in revising their essays, or in my classrooms amidst the hum (sometimes the chaos) of group activities, or on my way to lunch in the cafeteria, I constantly hear that phrase. “Can you come see, Ms. Shea?” “Ms. Shea, please come see!” And no matter how exhausted or stressed I am, I love hearing those words. They always bring me back to April retreat and my first moments of hopeful enthusiasm in ACE. They have served as a reminder again and again this past year of Christ being somehow in my students. It feels like I keep being nudged or woken up, whenever I fall into the sleep of discouragement or exhaustion or frustration—I’m invited to open my eyes again. “Yes, I’ll come see.”