Day 33 - Summer is Slipping by Again

The Painter’s brush delicately strokes yellow, red and orange on the tips of maple trees. The morning air is cooler and sweeter. The sun’s rays work harder to push warmth into each new day. The rain falls sweeter still and washes away the haze that has gripped the distant landscape during the hot summer weeks.

The harvest will continue through the next few months as children return to school. Summer’s lessons of running on the beach, hiding in the forest and playing make believe give way to those in classrooms. Hopefully the imagination of teachers will find ways to conjoin the two. We tend to make learning more serious than it needs to be. Too often we make stern faces and talk with deeper voices because we have very important curriculum to teach. A teacher’s greatest challenge is to fan the coals of curiosity that precede serendipitous moments of learning and then gently and carefully lay the tinder of reading, writing and arithmetic on the embers so they too catch fire.