In third grade, I had the best
teacher in the world. Her name was Mrs.
Vivian Falkner,[i]
and she did everything she could to remind us that even though we were in
school, the world is an exciting, mysterious place. And she showed us that school can be an exciting, mysterious place, too.
She spent lots of time observing
us, figuring out what our strengths were, our weaknesses. What our interests were. What we loved. What we hated. And she would encourage our interests, build
on our strengths—all in ways that somehow improved our weaknesses, diminished
our hatreds.
She would take us outside—all the
time, in any kind of weather—to look at plants, insects, pools of water, the
sky, mounds of dirt, snow, ice, rocks—anything, really. And we would always learn something strange,
something we were glad to know. Even
I—who’d done so much reading and studying on my own—even I felt I was learning
things, every day. I loved her class.
And—like all great teachers—she was
always ready to change her plans if something came up that seemed more
interesting. One day, we were blowing
bubbles in class, using those little bottles of bubbly fluid with the little
plastic devices to scoop up the fluid, to blow through, to make the bubbles. Mrs. Falkner delighted me when I asked her
what those little plastic devices were called: “Wands,” she said. “They’re called wands.”
Why
not? I thought. They help us do magic!
Anyway, we were blowing bubbles
that day, seeing how various air currents affected them, when someone blurted
out: “Mrs. Falkner, why do these bubbles seem to have little windows on them?”
And the next thing you know, we
were gathered around Mrs. Falkner, learning about reflections, looking at
reflective surfaces around the room, wondering why some surfaces—like window
panes—can be both transparent and
reflective. Why can you both see yourself in a window—and see through it?
Another time, a kid asked, “Why is
the night so scary?”
And dealing with that question took Mrs. Falkner about
six weeks. We stopped what we were doing
and studied all about the night. Why night
is longer for part of the year. Why you don’t always see the same stars in
the same place. Why the moon looks
different. We learned about people who
had jobs at night. We read stories and
poems about night. We listened to music
about night. Look at paintings about
night. I loved Van Gogh’s Starry Night—the vibrant colorful sky
above the sleeping village. As if Van
Gogh were saying, This world is so
amazing that even when you’re asleep, the magic continues! Increases!
See what you’re missing? We
did experiments with our night vision.
We learned about animals and plants that came out only at night. We
learned about the history of the street lamp.
About how cities in the Middle Ages had walls around them and gates they
would lock at night. And all those words
and sayings with night in them—like nighthawk and nightmare and night blindness
and night club and night table and so many more. I liked this saying she told us about: The night has a thousand eyes, and the day
but one.
We went to her house one time and saw one of her plants, a
night-blooming cereus, a variety of cactus that blooms only at night. When the white flower opened, we all clapped
and cheered, and when I looked at Mrs. Falkner, I could see tears in her eyes.
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