on teaching teachers

Thursday, July 12, 2012


This week, as readers of this blog know, I am at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where K-12 teachers from all around the area have gathered for the VAST: Nature Through the Lens of Art/Science program.  For two hours each afternoon I share passages from books I love, lay down challenges, talk about Rilke and Cezanne, Stanley Kunitz and Vaddey Ratner, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, ghosts in gardens and rivers that flow.  They write and I listen.  I suggest, and they counter.

The teachers surprise me.  They make me smile.  They are writers, too, many of them, and certainly they are readers—men and women with opinions about what can and should trigger memory, say, or about the color blue, or about students they'll always remember.  They are charming and determined and, most of all, curious and hopeful.  They make me wish that I was learning in their classrooms.


3 comments:

patti.mallett_pp said...

Makes me want to be a mouse in the corner taking all this in (again)!

Q said...

One of the things I like best about you, Beth, is your capacious ability to see the amazing in everyone.

Serena said...

That sounds like a great way to spend your week

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