Long-termer

We've been together, teachers and student, 15 weeks more or less. Your English has improved much in some ways, little in others. Sixteen weeks is a long time to be a student in a city far from your country and your family (your work always knows where to find you.)  It's time. You've had all the lessons.You're ready to go home.

I'll be gone next week so won't see you graduate. So, today in the passage, people pushing by left and right, you said 'We have to say goodbye now', and asked 'When will you come to my country?'

Things I admire and have liked about you: your even temperament week after week; your friendliness to all your fellow students (who have cycled in and out many times during your stay); your passion for personal systems for the ordering the tasks of life; your love of the road (specifically Rte 100 in Vermont); your readiness to be enthusiastic about the Microsoft facility in Cambridge for example; your unexpected wit, never irresponsible, always intelligent; your smile which coordinates with all the other features of your face to present a clear message of  'pleased to see you'; your notebook of new vocabulary words (one of those private systems); your curiosity about others, your comic gift shown in theatrical situations, your openness to ideas.

You've spent many hours across the table from each one of us, including me. It's difficult to remain yourself, remain authentic, over such a period, especially in the countdown weeks when you want more and more to be with your wife and daughters, and entertain less and less hope of a major breakthrough, and yet you have: your presence as been consistent, and positive.

I too have hung around for a long time, seen not just students but teachers come and go, done much the same thing year after year. It's been not quite a challenge but certainly a concern that I not become stale, petty, closed, boring, as the circumstances might readily have allowed, even encouraged, me to. I mean, all this cycling of leaders, programs, students, colleagues, lessons, activities--and me not one who cultivates long-term relationships.

Still, though the cloud of could haves and should haves hangs over me, I feel somehow still on the cutting edge of my life, the prospect of what's ahead as stimulating as the contemplation of what's behind. This blog, the God-in-love framework, ideas about teaching that are still work developing, and more, not mention my family: these are what keep me, me; keep me present in the moment.

Is it the same for you, or are you as naturally yourself as an oak is an oak, and never sometimes, say, a box elder? Whatever, I respect you and like you for your consistency and your personality. There's much I don't know and much that probably contradicts (as with any of us, as with me). I'd like, for instance, to see you be yourself in your place. But as one long-termer saying goodbye to another: it's been a pleasure and an honor. Stay authentic; in the end it counts.