By Ann Rennie
Robert Frost wrote that he was not a teacher, but an awakener.
I was awakened to much in the world around me by those who taught me, guided me, loved me. I was known and named with my freckles and buck teeth, my eagerness to please, knowing my catechism answers and cleaning the blackboard at the end of the day.
Each year when school starts, a new journey begins.Credit: Getty Images
The teachers, religious and lay, gave me tiny fragments of their hearts when they smiled at me or patted me on the shoulder or cheered me on as I ran third in the 200 metres. They unleashed in me the holy curiosity of which Albert Einstein wrote; the curiosity of finding out more, of reading widely, of experimenting with words and ideas, of performing, of putting in, of looking ahead optimistically and with gratitude for my chances and opportunities.
They taught me about trying, and trying again, and trying for a third time. Trying, failing forward, getting better at something, taking on feedback, improving, doing it again, finally getting it right. I eventually succeeded because I put in the effort, listened to well-intentioned feedback and had the sense to listen to those who were my wise elders. And perhaps, in those days before the pugnacious primacy of individualism and the fear of frankness, I had enough humility to know that I could always do better.
We all start school with a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Our lives are still to be scripted, still to be played out. But as the days add up into years, all the experiences and interactions and attitudes and behaviours that impact on us are brewed in a melting pot out of which our identity and destiny emerges.
The theologian Hans Von Balthasar wrote: “What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.” As we grow, we join the dots of passion and promise, somehow realising the potential within and using it to create gifts and talents that make us who we are. Over time, the blank slate becomes the portrait of a life.
Each year when school starts, a new journey begins. For the preps, it is a few small steps as they begin school. For the year 12s, it is one giant impatient leap as they ready themselves to leave school. In the middle years, the years of taciturnity and anxiety and hormones, there is sometimes one step forward and two steps back as each individual begins to negotiate the course of their future studies.
We all have our school stories and somewhere in those long years there is a teacher who offered us the stars, who pushed us because they saw potential, who helped us to become, as the poet John O’ Donoghue writes, the person God dreamed us to be.