My dear friend and fellow-National Teacher of the Year Finalist from Alabama, Ann Marie Corgill, just began a new teaching position with second-graders in the city of Birmingham. The youthfulness of her students really spoke to me this week. They are sweet, undisciplined, flighty children right now, still floating through the unstructured haze of summer. However, Ann Marie is such an incredible teacher that by May of 2016, these little ones will not just be a little older and a little taller, but they will be a lot closer to whatever their potential is.
What delights me most about this upcoming transformation is that they have absolutely no idea it is coming! Ann Marie said that on the first day, they made some rules and promptly broke those rules. She laughed about it, or I did, but the pearl in her statement is that the children were part of both the making and breaking of the rules. Ann Marie did not dictate; she wants them to be partners in this learning journey. And, every journey has a starting point. Ann Marie is an extraordinary human being, and she will both honor their starting point at the same time she helps them become aware that a starting point is not a destination.
Nacho is a two-year-old lab, 68 pounds, all muscle and fur. While he was born into a breeding program that focuses on guide dogs, some of his compatriots chose other careers by being more suited to something other than guiding. Nacho grew up among canines who became autism service dogs, explosive detection dogs, family pets and guide dogs. All of them, though, were once wiggly little puppies whose attention wandered and whose potential was hidden beneath folds of fuzzy puppy fluff. Time and training uncovered that potential for each of them, but it took steady hands and discerning hearts to help that journey move forward.
I marvel philosophically at how we all start in a place where imagining complete transformation is profoundly impossible. Yet, we transform. We become more than we could ever imagine and different from what we could ever imagine. Thank goodness this is so, for stagnation is pretty boring! I'd venture to say that Ann Marie's classroom is not boring, nor are the antics of little labby pups exploring the world around them. Hail to the second-graders and to the puppies! You keep us all young!
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Follow Ann Marie's teaching journey here:
http://www.truthjoypossibilities.com
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See a couple of Nacho puppy pictures here, thanks to Nicole Guite at Guiding Eyes for the Blind:
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