Week 30: Full Circle
And here we are again: back where we started at the beginning of the year with a Socratic seminar. This past week you guys participated in a pinwheel discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird. In doing so, you all did what Atticus urges us all to do: walk a mile in someone else's shoes. You pretended to be Atticus, Scout ad Jem and answered questions from your classmates by imagining what it might be like to think like that specific character. I heard so many wonderful questions and stood amazed at how much each of you have grown in your communication skills since that first discussion in September.
Much like Scout and Jem, you grew without even realizing it, and it dawned on me, our growth comes from doing the difficult thing, facing a challenge head on, and realizing we are stronger than we think we are/ capable of so much more than we originally thought possible.
This is how I feel about this year as well. Even though I have been teaching over fifteen years, each year is a new opportunity to stretch myself to be better and do better than the previous year. I hope I have done that well this year, and even though, like many of you, I am getting tired at week 29, I know I will finish strong and come back next year to do it all over again because if there is one thing I have learned, it is that a work is never really finished. A true artist knows the ending is really just the beginning of the same big circle.
Circling on,
Mrs. Bell
