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Saturday, December 15, 2012

"Look for the Helpers" - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

"Look for the Helpers" - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:


"Look for the Helpers"

The atrocious details are coming through the fog of saturated news coverage. The teacher who ushered her students into closets before she was killed. The teacher who told her students that she loved them so that would be the last thing they were thinking about. The principal who ran towards the gun fire instead of to safety.
On this day we are reminded that classroom teachers, staff and administrators are on the front lines with our children every day. They are witnesses to the children's growth and growing pains. They see the blossoming and the blight.
We are in a time of controlled chaos, it seems at times. As the last stanza from Dover Beach reads,
Ah, love, let us be true

To one another!
for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Look to helpers - that is the simple