Eros and Cupid

It is so strange how an average teacher has to deal with… a morning every day. I don’t know anybody, of course except for Krystyna, who is crazy enough to be anxious to get up early, take this shoulder bag and head briskly to their educational institution. It is impossible to do the same things every day with the same sparkle in the eye. But the Young Eye needs it every day; the same way they need everyday motherly love. They go for “the new things” more or less knowingly: for a mark, reprimand, praise or… for a break.

“You get butterflies only at the beginning” says Krystyna, but still everybody likes her. 

Krystyna – it is her who forces Marek, Arek and me to think. Neither this dull physics teacher, nor the New one in Polish, who makes everybody feel at ease, even the most laid-back guys in Grade 6. And what about us? Marek, Arek and me? What kind of teachers are we going to be in 20 years?

I am still doing some honest “gymnastics” to carry out my teaching with this fashionable passsssion. Is it right? Now I realize that it is not, that we shouldn’t work that way and that it is not what we should demand from our children’s teachers. All that counts and should be pursued at school is VOCATION. This word has a “calling” in it. And this calling is something big, calling “for” something. One that has a vocation simply loves what they do instead of getting excited with their brilliant lessons. Sounds like cliché? I think not. I’d rather call it “stability” with beautiful moments of elation, hard ground under our feet and love for our students. And hatred towards a school register, obviously.

Passion comes and goes. It is like an aphrodisiac; like Eros, but not Cupid. It attracts you and gives a wave of freshness necessary to live. But our life is not all about it, is it?

Flowers, coffee and get back to work.

But maybe I am simply getting old?

The New One

It begins beautifully, innocently and with full love. The New One is vulnerable and has to be caressed and tamed. They say that caressing is good only at the very beginning, whereas taming – educational.

They say so when the New one appears. They jump, scream and cry. The world seems so beautiful and bleached from guilt when the New One arrives. The New One requires energy flowing to him from the outside, power of caressing and flexible boundaries. He can evolve and he blossoms.

He grows.

He grows up in contexts, circumstances and orders. Treated like a plant, he has his wings trimmed to make them, as they say, grow faster. In that way the New One receives the form to be intertwined easier in so called “ in between”.

The New One determines his condition, learns how to take his first steps, how to toddle no more. He sets the limits of this condition by saying “I can’t anymore” or “I want more” and screams out many other statements to himself.

Eventually, there will come a time for the Newer One. It means finding some place for him too. Simpler moves in space where everything has a specific (its own?) place. 

One day the New One becomes the Old One – known and predictable.

The wings are trimmed no more, impossible to grow.

The Old One, however, will remain the New One as long as he ... remembers.