As I was putting together a collection of cottonwood twigs to share at a forthcoming workshop (you know, I break open the twig at a circular growth point and expose the beautiful hidden star) when John Steinbeck crept into my mind.
So, I checked my journal and reread one of his quotes about teaching I'd written down long ago:
'I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are few as there are any other great artists.
It might even be the greatest of all the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.'
Brilliant!! Right on the button!!
Oh, yes, here's Steinbeck's
Like Captured Fireflies
'In her classroom our speculations ranged the world.
She aroused us to book waving discussions.
Every morning we came to her carrying new truths, new facts, new ideas cupped and sheltered in our hands like captured fireflies.
When she went away a sadness came over us,
but the light did not go out.
She left her signature upon us,
the literature of the teacher who writes on students’ minds.
I’ve had so many teachers who taught soon forgotten things but only one like her who created in me a new thing, a new attitude, a new hunger.
I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that teacher.
What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person. '
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