Rumi‘s words remind me, as a teacher, that my teaching is more than just providing information for students to learn in a rote way for recall on a test. If what children and adults learn does not have meaning to them, it becomes “yellow or stagnates.”
On the last day I taught, my students gave me a card and gift, but it was the words they offered that meant the most. They told me it was not learning from an official curriculum, but the “other things” that would mean the most to them in later years.
Curriculum comes from the Latin currere and means “running a course” and relates to living one’s life. In running the course and living one’s life, the other tablet comes to life. It is who and what that are close to our hearts that mean the most. As we live life, we discover what that means in sometimes surprising ways.
It is what we reflect upon and are mindful of, reflecting who we are, that brings the greatest joy to our running and recounting the course of our lives.
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 