Being small is important, too! 8/25/13

A kindergartner once gave me a picture he had drawn.  (Once?  A million times, probably, but I'm thinking of one in particular.) In this picture, I am very, very tall and the child is very small.  It surprised me a little, because I forget just how tall I must seem to those little darlings. Honestly, they might even think I'm a giant!  I try to be very nice to them, so at least they think I'm a nice giant!  As the new year begins tomorrow morning, I will be making sure that I kneel to their level so they aren't scared of me, and see me as kind, caring and someone they can trust.  I will have a "BIG" day tomorrow.  I've found, though, that it is important to have "SMALL" days, also. 

In the classroom, I am a force.  I am in charge.  I am the one that answers the questions.  Right teachers?  Teachers are the ones that establish the procedures and make sure that they occur each day.  Teachers are the voice of authority.  Teachers loom in stature over students - figuratively and sometimes (as in my case) literally.  We are in charge.  Sometimes I'm in charge of so many things that my favorite moment of the day happens when I can say "I don't know, I'm not in charge of that!"

Within a family setting, the adults are BIG, too.  Whether you are a parent or not, you run a household of some sort; making financial decisions, taking care of day-to-day chores, planning vacations, deciding which social events to attend.  We are all BIG within our own house.  It should be that way - our house is where we are loved and valued. When conflict happens within a household, it hurts more, because everybody is BIG, so hurts are big, too.  If you look at the other side of the coin, though, happiness is magnified many times over in a loving house where everyone is BIG.

But what happens when we need to feel SMALL?  When I taught high school, I was BIG within the classroom.  Sometimes, during my planning, I walked one block east, then one block south so I could stand there and look out at the Gulf.  It's vast, and the waves never stop.  Just doing that for a few minutes gave me a peace that I could carry back into the classroom, where I was BIG again.

  I went for a hike in the woods today, with some friends.  As we walked, we talked about problems, victories, plans, hopes, dreams - all those things that you decide at home, where you are BIG.  But every now and then, I looked up from the path.  Enormous mature trees surrounded us.  The path under our feet was uneven, with huge roots crisscrossing under our feet.  Insects whizzed by us - it's their world, and we were interrupting!  I felt small. Really small.  It's a relief to be small for a while.  Our hike stopped for a while at an old cemetery.  We've visited before, it's small, well-kept, peaceful and beautiful in its own way.  I started looking at headstones that were shared by husbands and wives.  In that tiny cemetery, I saw so many wives that outlived their husbands by ten, twenty, even forty years.  Some of the births date back to the 1860s, while the deaths begin around 1880.  The thought occurred to me, while standing in that cemetery, that I am not the first widow in the history of the world, nor will I be the last.  The thing that has become my main identifying factor right now is actually smaller than I thought it was.  That doesn't make it any less sad, or difficult.  Me saying that it is small is not saying that it doesn't devastate me  I never know when it is going to strike me like a lightening bolt.  No, what I discovered in the cemetery today is that I will go on living.  That discovery lets me know that I will face BIG type choices about my own self, and will have be able to decide things and keep on living.

Tomorrow is the first day of school for students.  As teachers, we actually have to be enormous tomorrow.  We have to establish procedure, start building relationships, be kind, caring and loving at the same time we are laying behavioral groundwork, going over the rules and nipping potential foolish students in the bud.  It's huge.

 I hope that all my teacher friends have found some time to be SMALL this weekend. It can be nature that gives you that feeling.  It can be a crowd - I'll bet my friends that were at the Texans game today felt SMALL.  Sunday worship reminds us how SMALL, yet valuable we are. There are plenty of ways to feel SMALL, so that you can go back to being BIG - successfully.  Nothing is worse than a mean giant.  I wish all of you equal amounts of BIG and SMALL