I was thinking about enthusiasm last night.
I went to my daughter’s parents evening with my daughter(how things have changed for the good!) and couldn’t help noticing how we left certain rooms with different levels of energy and smiles. This was accumulative over the two hours we were there and then this morning, driving home after the school drop off, I was listening to Radio 4 and an interview with a violinist called |Tamsin about Vaughan Williams and her interpretation of the famous ‘Lark Ascending’. I made a connection and felt I had to write it down!
The music she found always moved her more than other pieces, and this she felt was due to its movement, its ascending direction that somehow took her elsewhere on a spiritual level: even a heavenly level she felt, whether you wanted to subscibe to the idea of heaven or not.
So I played the piece and there was the feeling from last night. An ascending energy and a powerful experience of personal aliveness. A joy in the ‘me-ness’ and the ‘you-ness’ of life, so vital to our well being and happiness, and so carelessly sabotaged by cynicism and pettiness.
And that’s what others can do and we can do for others. We can go ‘up’ and encourage others to go ‘up’ and feel happy in their unique and transient life, or we can go down and take others down too, to that hollow vale of pettiness and misery.
Who would chose down and want ‘down’ when you can go up? And if this is you why would you ever want to teach? In teaching I believe it is an essential responsibility to go up and to inspire others to go up! To ascend like the lark!
Words, like music can do this. Authenticity is integral to this effect. So when a teacher specifically reveals that they ‘know’ a student and can identify and give expression to the very individual aspect of the child before them, and with acceptance and warmth, then they can ascend. Both teacher and student can ascend and can inspire and be inspired.
And I say authentic deliberately as children more than adults recognise fraudulent attempts at warmth and friendship. Warmth and this ‘ascending’ rapport through specific attention is not cloying or falsely flattering. There is nothing more ennervating than a stream of hyperbolic, disengaged banalities that are untrue!
Children know when they are not being recognised. They deserve to be recognised, to be inspired and to ascend.
So I came home and played the Lark Ascending and thought yes, that’s why my daughter and I felt good last night. We ascended through some enthusiastic recognitions about being ‘me’.
Dr Janet Lewison