Encarnacion Exploration, Part 2

Shortly after arriving, I got a hotel close to the bus terminal and splurged an extra five dollars for a room with air conditioning and cable (the first of both luxuries, I can proudly say, I had had in six months). I wasn’t disappointed by the extra commodities, either, as the air conditioning ran at a constant and frigid rate throughout the night and the cable had CNN in Spanish along with some of my favorite American cartoons translated.

In the morning I boarded a bus which, on its way to another big city, would pass directly by the ruins. My ride, as one of those extra passengers without a seat that I disliked so much from the day before, was a quick forty five minutes before I got off at a deserted stop with signs pointing to the ruins of two different Jesuit missions at Jesus and Trinidad. Although at first glance the stop looked empty, a second bus waited beyond one corner to take me the extra ten miles to the town of Jesus. This bus line, leaving when it was full, passed its entire trip on an unpaved road a maximum of once every two hours. After passing through the quiet but dusty Paraguayan village called Jesus’ town, the conductor let me off at the end of its route where a fence for the Jesuit ruins marked the boundary of the historical site. I walked an extra two blocks to the entrance, where for a dollar fee I was granted admission and, upon request for a tour brochure explaining the site, was given a pamphlet on the broader industry of Paraguayan tourism.

Although information on the Jesuit ruins was unimpressive, the architecture that remained of the mission town was anything but. The main attraction was the huge earthy basilica, three stories high and partially reconstructed from the deep-rust colored stones originally cut and carried from miles around, which stood firmly planted on a plateau like some medieval fortress. Outside the church walls, the stone architecture still bore Christian imagery carved by people converted from distinctly unchristian ways of life. Inside the church, the emerald-green grass spread like a fine carpet over the sanctuary, and the now-truncated pillars that originally supported the rafters seemed to be like so many well-ordered altars. At the head of the church stood the artificially-supported stone of the original altar, which undoubtedly witnessed so many thousands of masses and so many thousands more of natives coming to share at the table of Christian Truth and Faith.

I was able to pass all over the sight without any boundaries and without the company of any other tourists. The place was completely quiet and empty, as if the spirits of the Jesuits and natives long passed on still guarded and protected the town as a sacred and secret space. The only other people I saw, except for all those ghosts that I easily imagined were still worshipping, learning, selling, and socializing in the ruins of the church, school, marketplace, and plaza, were some living Paraguayans cutting the massive fields of grass with tiny gas lawnmowers. With their broad hats and Paraguayan style of clothing, though, it wasn’t too difficult for me to imagine them as some of the original inhabitants. I explored and imagined with great reverence and delight, even climbing the thirty-foot bell tower to see all the ruins together with the Paraguayan countryside spread out before me like so many panoramic photos in National Geographic. There, all I could hear was the wind, which seemed to whisper in my ear of forgotten times and histories and peoples and faiths.

After my two hours of imagination and exploration ended, I caught the bus’s next round out of the village and, after it let me off, walked a bit further to the other ruins at Trinidad. There, I spoke with the gal in charge of the site who I imagined was an idealistic and eccentric student of Paraguayan history, but who was in reality an unassuming college-age youth sipping terreré with her two friends on a hot country day. I asked her about the Jesuit missions, and what her opinion of them was. In Lamabaré, I had talked with many people—both Protestants and Catholics—who told me that the Jesuits organized the missions to exploit natives and steal gold to send to Rome. I wanted to know the truth, which I was willing to equate with her own opinion of the Jesuits, because I figured that the gatekeeper of the missions would be the best person to know.

I was surprised and pleased when the history she told me was much different than what I had heard. These huge and productive missions were no exploitative slave plantations as some imagine and slander, she recounted, but instead self-governing and self-supporting communities of natives under the guidance of only a couple Jesuits. These missions really did help the Indians and actually brought the indigenous peoples many good things. Although when I watched The Mission with some of my future-Jesuit friends at Georgetown I thought the Hollywood production idealized too much of the Jesuit-organized native communities, this gal told me that the movie was pretty accurate and that the towns really did work well for everyone’s benefit.

Many of these social goods that the villages provided, manifested in the architecture of a well-to-do culture and the adornments of a Christian lifestyle, could still clearly be seen in the ruins of both Jesuit towns. Although I thought the first ruins I saw were mighty impressive, the ruins in Trinidad were even more extensive and long-standing than those in Jesus. European-style sculptures in the church adorned everything from the statues and baptistery in back to the altar and preaching-stand up front. The bell tower, a complete structure separate from the church, still stood tall and proud watching over all the many Roman-style arches and porticoes of ruins surrounding it.

I left Trinidad in the middle of the afternoon as the sun began to burn through my two applications of sun screen and my lowly hat lost all its good function in the brightness of the blinding light. After buying a souvenir hand-cut stone representation of the Bell tower pencil-holder for only two dollars, I boarded a bus back to Ecarnación where I once again left for Asunción. After a long day of sight-seeing, learning, and imagining, I was tired to the bone and ready to rest. As the bus’s gentle swaying rocked me into a steady and sound sleep, though, I had one more opportunity to pass through the extraordinary Jesuit villages. This time in my dreams, however, I was actually able to see and hear and to touch and smell the bustling eighteenth-century society; to meet and converse with so many dedicated priests whose Holy-Spirit inspired work brought the teachings of the church to a new continent; and to marvel first-hand at the wonder of an entire native people group recently and miraculously converted to Christ.

Encarnacion Exploration, Part 1

Tuesday morning of Holy Week I left for Ecarnación, a cosmopolitan city by Paraguayan standards located a drive that ought to be only about five and half hours away from Asunción. The reason I say that the drive ought to be only five and a half hours, though, is because it took us nearly seven and a half hours to get there. Paraguayan bus companies refuse to leave the terminal until every vacant seat has been filled and then, after they leave for the destination city, they pick up every other person along the way who wants to travel. These unfortunate passengers have the bad luck of standing the entire trip, but I’m certain it’s a well-deserved form of karma punishing them for lost time on the trip.

Be that as it may, the bus to Ecarnación at one point had nearly two and a half dozen extra people crammed into the isle. One family, a group of ten indigenous tribesfolk who boarded the bus without seats, stood out particularly to me. Their skin was a dark but brilliant bronze, their cheek bones stuck out like knucklebones, and their hair was equally black and bowl-cut (except for the oldest son, who had a mullet). Paraguayans generally make fun of these sorts of people by saying that they appear so indigenous that they’re only missing the traditional feathers of native tribespeople to complete the look. The grandma among the bunch, though, really was so indigenous that she even carried around the feathers, for luck.

I normally wouldn’t notice the family, but the grandma, who wore a colorful patterned skirt along with a holey t-shirt through which you could see her bare chest indistinguishable from her bare belly, didn’t have a seat. She made it all the way to the back of the bus where I was, too, without anyone offering her their seat as is the respectful Paraguayan custom. Being the culturally-savvy and Christian traveler that I am, though, I offered this dear old Indian woman my seat and stood up with her many children and grandchildren. After a long while some seats cleared and I was able to sit next to my Indian grandma. She tried speaking to me in Guaraní, the national native Paraguayan tongue, but I had no idea what she was saying. Still, she seemed content to talk to me as long as I shook my head and feigned understanding. At one point, a Coke vendor boarded the bus selling drinks to the thirsty travelers. The native grandma tried to give him her lucky feathers in exchange for a cold Coke, but he laughed and refused.

The bus continued on its interminable ride all day long through the unending Paraguayan countryside, full of ranches and estates and tens of thousands of cows grazing on the grassy plains. The land reminded me of old westerns I’ve seen, and at one point I thought I even recognized the ranch from the show Ponderosa. It was beautiful and open and free, though, and real farm country, too, like there is in western Ohio with big tractors and impressive combines and every other sort of farm implement. I saw real cowboys rounding up a herd of cows, along with every other imaginable form of frontier living.

Around five-thirty in the afternoon we finally arrived to Ecarnación. My purpose for the trip wasn’t to meet an indigenous grandma or see the Paraguayan prairie, though, but instead to visit the Jesuit ruins, about the only must-see thing in Paraguayan guidebooks and an officially-declared United Nations World Heritage Site. Located thirty kilometers outside of Ecarnación, the ruins are the remnants of a great missionized society that the Jesuits organized in the 17th and 18th centuries. Here, the Pope’s priests brought together tens of thousands of native Americans into quasi-European social structures and ways of life. The towns were hugely productive and hugely beneficial to the tribespeople, giving them Western society and Christian values and a share in productive work. A 1986 movie starring Robert Dinero­­, The Mission, offers a unique perspective into the stories of these missions and their ways of life. As the movie also shows, however, the Jesuit project was eventually shut down because the great power held by the Jesuits became a threat to the established imperial governments and the latter’s wanton appetites for colonial exploitation of the native populations.

A ¨Mary¨Time

Monday I continued my grand tour of Paraguay and visited Caácupe, the center of Paraguayan Catholicism and the place where stand both the country’s most famous basilica and the most-venerated statue of Mary, the Virgin of Caácupe. Every year on December 8^th, the Catholic feast celebrating the Immaculate Conception (Mary’s, that is) brings several tens of thousands of the devoted to Caácupe on a pilgrimage by foot. They end up in droves at the basilica, where they ask Mary for all sorts of things and petition her for all varieties of favors to be granted. The town is an important place to understand Paraguayan Catholicism, and, in effect, to understand most of Paragauyan culture, too.

The Monday that I visited, Caácupe was a quiet and simple town in the hilly countryside. The sun shone brightly and the sky was crystal blue, but plenty of green trees provided shade as the bus passed through the hills. The ride took about two hours, but I enjoyed getting out of the city a little bit and seeing the campo. The basilica and surrounding town itself is located on a large hill, so the church’s huge globe-of-a-dome can be seen from miles around. I disembarked right in front of the basilica, and proceeded to scope out the area.

The first thing I noticed surrounding the plaza of the church were the dozens and dozens of santerias, stores selling images and statues of the saints along with all varieties of rosaries, holy bracelets, and Virgin of Caácupe souvenirs. There were even blue plastic water bottles, Aunt Jemina-style, in the form of the Virgin for about $8 a pop. It all reminded me of the scene in the movie Luther, where the famed reformer is sickened by the outrageous sales of religious articles and the vendors who take advantage of unprudent religious fervor. My reaction wasn’t so strong as Martin Luther’s, but I could see that the shopkeepers definitely made a good business off of the pilgrims who come to see the famed statue of Mary.

One thing I did find revolting in Caácupe, however, was the sale of pornography in booths right next to the santerias. In a town where every penny is made by remembering a holy virgin and her purity of life, there was filth and pornographic trash sold side by side with images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. It made me sick to see how great a fall from its original Christian ideals Paraguay has taken, and how hollow indeed a society’s faith can be to allow such promiscuity to exist right next to and even intermingled with things considered so holy.

I realized too, though, that I’d be a huge hypocrite to say that Paraguayans are the only ones with this problem. After seeing the way good and evil coexisted so easily and so blatantly side by side in the shops of Caácupe, I was convicted that I, too, so often tolerate inner and disgusting sin in my life alongside all the good and outward Christian things. The Apostle James’s poignant question was pointed at me and Paraguay both—“Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs?” The answer, of course, is that “Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.” Good doesn’t come from evil, and evil doesn’t come from good, and they should not and cannot exist together in either Caácupe or my own life.

After walking around town and thinking about these things for a while, I finally entered the bright white basilica, which looks like an extraterrestrial colony set among the natural green and red hues of the city streets and parks. Inside, the walls were painted with an equally intense shade of white, but brilliant colors poured through the beautifully-stained glass windows. I was taken back by the simplicity of the basilica: I had expected to find a complex and gothic church with images of saints and the smells of incense and burning novenas everywhere, but I found a puritanical whitewashed sanctuary with strict benches and signs that prohibited lighting candles. At first, the only thing that told me for sure I was in a Catholic basilica was the papal banner hanging on one side of the altar up front.

Proceeding forward, I gingerly stepped through the church not wanting to disrupt anyone’s prayer or to look too much like a tourist with my camera in hand. As my eyes focused on the area beyond the altar, though, I could plainly see the famous Virgin of Caácupe. She stood on top of a little globe and wore a fancy crown and blue-spangled gown, representing her place in Catholic belief as the queen of saints in heaven and of the living church on Earth. Her hair was light auburn and curly, and her skin a very pale white. Set as the object of veneration among a nearly homogenous Paraguayan people with black hair and darker skin, she seemed very out of place and looked like a cheap European imported representation of the Mother of God. I was disappointed to see that the idea of beauty for Paraguayans, as represented by the Virgin of Caácupe, consisted in what seemed to me to be artificially light skin and European features.

A final thing I noted, then, about the highly-esteemed Virgin of Caácupe was that in real life the statue only stands about three feet tall. I had seen short imitation models of the statue around Asuncion, and I had always thought they were shorter just because they were copies of the real thing. Come to find out, though, up close even the real thing still just looks like a very big doll (sort of like the giant Barbie princesses I used to see in toy stores). Although so short and perhaps childish-looking in physical stature, however, the Virgin of Caácupe looms as a much taller and influential figure in the hearts and minds of Paraguayan Catholics as a guide, help, and succor for them and the nation.

Birthday Bash

It’s Holy Week here and around the world, and in Paraguay that means a week of vacations in remembrance of Jesucristo’s death and resurrection. Nearly everyone from the church is taking advantage of the time to visit relatives, so I, too, have decided to use this holy week for a vacation to see and hear the sights and sounds of the country I normally don’t have the time for. The things I’ve done the past few days will take up a few pages to explain, but I think they’ll give you and me a better understanding of Paraguay and her culture.

The first big day was last Saturday, the 15^th, and coincidentally my birthday, too. Paraguayans make a big deal out of birthdays, and the custom is to greet the birthday boy or girl with kisses and blessings and all sorts of show. Everyone asks for weeks ahead of time what your birthday plans are, and then for days after the fact they ask how it all went down. As for me, I hoped for a quiet birthday without much show, so I decided to visit Pilar, my Georgetown friend serving with a Catholic organization about an hour and a half bus ride away in Itagua.

I got off the bus around eleven in the morning along the main route, where Pilar was excited to greet me and show me around town. Itagua is known as a center for fancy Paraguayan needle and stitchwork, so nearly every local shop has windows full of beautifully colored and elaborately patterned fabrics. The town is far more colonial, and beautiful, too, than most of the neighborhoods I’ve seen in Asuncion. The central church and plaza are still the central parts of town where everyone comes to relax and do business, and the lazy streets are all lined with beautiful columned porticoes and Spanish-looking architecture. While Lambare, the neighborhood where I’m living, feels like New Jersey with its strip malls and endless, poorly-organized neighborhoods, Itagua seems like a beautiful, purposefully-designed New England village with life centered around the church.

Pilar then showed the ministry where she works, a serious neighborhood helps organization run by three serious nuns called the Good Shepherd. The ministry has several arms, each reaching out to embrace and serve the lives of many poor people in Itagua. One seeks to improve the livelihood of exploited women in the needlecraft industry, providing a co-op and network of help through which they can sell their crafts and earn fair wages. Another branch, the one Pilar is involved with, is a sort of microfinance enterprise that loans families money to raise animals and sell at profit, all the while offering the encouragement and training to continue growing a business responsibly. A third ministry, finally, matches poor Paraguayan children with donors from North America to provide the little ones with health care, educational materials, and decent daily meals in the context of a Christian community. I was very pleased to see all the ways these three Catholic sisters, and their three American volunteers, are so wrapped up and tied into serving the community as a witness for Christ. Their work, like the school project in Lambare, is having real good effects on the entire neighborhood around them.

After being showed around the ministry center and nunnery and actually being invited to a second lunch with the Paraguayan nuns, we went to visit a family being helped by the loan/education program Pilar helps coordinate. We went with the purpose of seeing the family’s first pig, Bonita, before they butchered her and sent her carcass off to market. When we arrived, though, we were already too late. The butchering had taken place at 6 in the morning, not at 6 at night as Pilar had thought, so instead of getting to see a real live breathing pig, we were invited to have a bite to eat. The family had kept and cooked Bonita’s fatty skin with some corn flower, making it into a delicious treat along with some boiled mandioca and red wine. Pilar and I were disappointed not to see the pig alive, but not too disappointed, because we left mighty happily with our stomachs full of rich fresh pork.

After our visit with the family who butchered their pig, I returned home to Lambare once again and went to Saturday night church, where everyone greeted me with great emotion and smiles upon my completion of 22 full years. Afterwards, I spent my evening just as I would have liked to: quietly, with a few friends, and with plenty memories of a birthday well-spent in Paraguay.

Chicken Sacrifice... For Real

I saw a sacrificed chicken along the route of my morning run today. It sat bloodily prostrated-- as if someone had squished it with a big foot from above-- on a ceramic saucer at the crossroads two blocks away from my house, just across from the place where yesterday morning a Palm Sunday service was held. It definitely freaked me out a bit, and reminded me that I’m in a place where the spirit world is very present to many people and where things like demon worship and witchcraft still take place.

My neighbors told me recently that the house next door to my own used to be a place of cultic rituals. Today, a Catholic family lives there with one daughter who’s even an evangelical. They told me, too, that they once found goat heads nicely arranged on their own front lawn, left by some angry relatives who also happened to believe in and pronounce evil curses. Bringing in the spirit world to deal with family disputes seems to take sibling rivalry and familial jealousies to an even higher level.

As for me, though, I trust that all these demonic powers have no power of me. I believe that they exist, for sure, and I even fear and respect them, but I also have the faith and trust that the Lord I serve has “disarmed all the rulers and authorities and put them to shame, by triumphing over them in the cross.” I know that, by putting my hope in the death and resurrection of Christ, all the powers of evil and death have lost all their powers over me, so I have nothing to fear as I pass by sacrificed chickens and hear rumors of all sorts of dark things. I plead the protection of the holy cross, the instrument through which, as we remember Christ’s passion this Easter week, God defeated all the dark spirits in the world.

Egg... All over my face

So, I realized yesterday that I’m the worst teacher, and maybe the worst person, in the entire world.
In the second grade class, there’s a girl named of Suely (Sway’-lee) who always has a terrible attitude. While everyone else at the start of class is eager to shake hands as we practice the word of the day, she coldly withdraws and refuses to greet me. While everyone else is doing their best work, she circles whatever answer is convenient and easiest to her without the slightest concern for truth. She’s apathetic and grouchy and hardly participates with the class.
Because of her strange and rude behavior, I responded in like unchristian manner. When she flippantly turned in her workbook, hastily and wrongly worked through, I tossed it back at her and told her to do it correctly. When it seemed like she purposefully chose the wrong answers, I upbraided her time and time again to do her work right. I got frustrated, mad, and was very curt with her: “Why don’t you ever try to do anything right?,” I asked her more than once. “You need to learn to do your best,” I told her angrily several times.
Come to find out, though, Suely doesn’t know how to read.
I wish her teacher would have told me a month and a half earlier-- before I got so upset, that is, and undoubtedly shamed this poor girl so terribly so many times in front of all her classmates. Now, though, I’ve got my big old foot in my mouth and there’s nothing I can do except apologize and be more understanding. Once again I’m humbled, but this time I feel like scum, too. I don’t know everything and I’m so human. Shoot.

I got a taste of some heavenly culture yesterday. There was a free Baroque music concert at the large and locally-well known Concordia Mennonite Church, so I made the special hour and fifteen minute trip for a rare but glorious showing of classical music. I wasn’t disappointed by what I found, either. Although completely out of step with the current Lenten season, the choir performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s Ascension Oratorio, a beautiful piece that portrays through musical composition the full range of emotions experienced by Christ and his disciples as the Lord ascended into Heaven. I myself was carried away in my imagination by the magical arrangement to one of the great concert halls of Europe, or perhaps the National Cathedral that I already know in Washington DC. Either way, the concert, with music some three hundred and fifty years old, was a tremendous gift in a country where pop music and pop everything is ever and always the rage.

It was a great gift to be in a place, too, where I didn’t look or feel so out of place. The Mennonite Church is full of Germans or Germanic-looking people-- folks of tall and proud stock with blonde hair and freckles and crystal blue eyes. There were even a bunch of older men who wore plaid and khakis, like me and my own people from Midwestern Ohio. For once, I was normal and fit in with a group of folks who looked just like me.

On the Paraguayan street, everyone always stares at me because I’m not Paraguayan or mestizo-looking. In the Mennonite church, though, I felt like my presence and my Germanic traits were expected. Rather than being an object of cultural curiosity, I was just a person among other blonde-haired and blue-eyed persons. An older fellow even tried to start a conversation with me in German, to which I responded politely in a mixture of Spanish and English. It might sound strange because I’m a fourth generation American, and I’ve even been wondering since yesterday if I have some secret and primal racism hidden deep within me, but I was really content and really peaceful to be among a bunch of German folk.

I’d be neglecting a very important detail about the concert, too, if I didn’t mention the fact that the most powerful person in all of Paraguay was in attendance. Yes, that’s right-- the American ambassador to Paraguay himself was at the church. There was an entire CIA security detail there to protect him, too: men with cool ear phones, super-sharp suits, and buzzed haircuts that looked like they were ready at a moment’s notice to karate-chop or shoot any one who messed with their American diplomat. They looked very out of place amid the simple and pacifist Mennonite congregation, but they made me feel safe and happy that there were a bunch of other Americans nearby. After the concert, the diplomat was quickly whisked away in a dark black Cadillac with police escort like many I got to see in DC. I never imagined I’d see an American diplomat in Paraguay, and you might even say I came here to escape some of the power and politics that I saw everywhere in Washington, but hey, what can I say? It’s hard to avoid smart and powerful people, and the things that smart and powerful people like to do (like go to Bach concerts in Paraguay), when you seem to yourself to be a smart and powerful person.

After the performance ended and I saw my diplomat leave, however, I was gently humbled and brought back to reality once again. There was no Cadillac escort to take me away, but a big dirty public bus that I waited nearly twenty minutes to catch. I then headed back to my three room, rents-at-less-than-$100/month-with-only-one-fan-and-a-stinky-toilet apartment, and put my folded clothes away in improvised drawers of old fruit crates. The sounds of Bach and high culture continued to swirl around in my mind and lift my spirits to the highest levels of the heavens, but everything else around me testified to the fact that I was very much a part of the lowly earth. Still, on a night like last night, I wouldn’t trade my place for any other in the entire world. I’m pretty sure living my young life on purpose for God, along with all the adventures and difficulties of living it in another country, is about as close to Heaven as I’ll ever get.

Tears Are Pride Leaving the Body

I definitely used to be one of those kids. I’m sure you probably knew me in school—the brown noser; that one dork who always got the A’s in every subject and who always did everything he could to please the adults around him. He was a strange one, for sure: that smart kid who obsessed over his grades and whose sense of self-worth was so strongly tied to good marks and praise from teachers. You probably could never understand when he cried over an A- on his fourth grade math test or when he faked sick in kindergarten to avoid talking to his teacher about a matter that really never was his fault, but for him, these sorts of things were world-shattering horrors.

As for me, though, I actually was that strange elementary school kid. I cried in Mr. Rossi’s class after I got a 92% on a math test (to this day most folks still don’t know that oranges weigh 2 pounds each and that people drink their coffee at 120 degrees Farenheit), and I pretended to have the stomach flu when I didn’t want to talk to my kindergarten teacher about something I was coerced into saying on the school bus (a bad-influence-of-a-friend told me to tell another kindergartener that I wanted to have sex with her. As an innocent five year old, I really had no idea what that meant, but apparently my rotten friend, this girl and her mom, and the school principal did). Yep, I was that smart and suggestible and proud kid. I did my best in everything, was very self conscious about it all, and, when my best wasn’t good enough, I cried.

All of this long personal history puts me in a unique position of empathy with those same sorts of kids that I’m getting to know now that I’m a teacher. There are a few students who try so hard to please me, just like I tried so hard to please my own teachers. There are a few who will do just about anything to get a good mark, even giving up their recess time to study English, just like I tried everything I could to put an extra plus sign after my A. After only three weeks teaching, too, I’ve already seen a few students in my classes cry when, like me in elementary school, things didn’t go there way.

As a teacher who was there in their place at one time not so long ago, I can empathize with them. I know well the feeling of disappointment and self-hatred after even a minor failure. I, like one of my first-time English students who is stressing out over a new foreign language, spent many nights of my innocent youth worrying over classes and whether I’d ever be able to accomplish the tasks set before me. I cried many times at discipline and correction, too, never wanting to be wrong at any time in public. I was easily-humiliated, and easily affected by how others thought of me.

Since that time, though, I’ve learned a lot. I’m a lot more thankful for what I have these days, and I don’t always think about what I don’t have. I’m not so easily moved by what others think is right, and am a lot more confident in what I think is right. This doesn’t change the fact that there are still standards and truths and sometimes I get them very wrong, but I’ve come to know that I’m just a human person and I make mistakes. Slowly, I’m getting better at accepting that. I know, too, that’s it’s a good thing to be humbled every once in a while and to believe that there are a lot of people a lot smarter and a lot better than me.

Knowing my own life and how much I’ve learned through so many painful lessons, I can’t help but be pleased when I see my own students learning these same things. It might seem a little strange that I smile when one of my best students misses recess for misbehavior, but I know they’re learning the important lesson that no one is better than the rule of law. I might seem to be a different sort of teacher when I’m glad to see a very bright student shedding a tear over her bad grade on a quiz, but I’m content to believe that those tears are very important and never shed in vain, demonstrating to her and the world that no one is perfect. Discipline and correction and humble pie certainly makes all of my students and me much better people. No one is perfect or invisible, and we’re all in need of a world of correction and training. Although it’s tough for me and my students to hear sometimes, we’ve all got a long way to go, a lot of humility to learn, and maybe some crying to do along the way, too.