Ruhi Book 3

Bart and I are facilitators for those who want to teach Baha'i Children's Classes. I really, really like this course. It is one of the courses we took back in 1992 or '93 when we were contemplating and then began homeschooling. Why? Because it doesn't so much teach curriculum (although it does have outlines for 15 lesson plans) but because it teaches the attitude that the teacher is required to have before, during and after teaching children.

We are to teach the children how to teach themselves. How to mine for the gems, within. The teacher should not be attached to the outcome of the lesson. Did the child learn the quotation by the time they return to class the next week? What does it matter to the teacher? It should only matter in the context of teaching the child how to memorize and what the child gets out of the accomplishment. The teacher shouldn't judge themselves on the child's abilities or accomplishments, neither postive or negative because both of these are purely subjective.

If the child easily memorizes the quote but is terrorizing the kids when out playing what difference did the memorization do? If the child is terrorizing the other kids outdoors, shouldn't the teacher know the homelife BEFORE deciding on appropriate response? Yes, stop the negative behavior and protect the rest of the children but before the blaming and naming game begins find out what the child is reacting to. Is it a selfish nature? Use the selfishness to show a postive side of selfishness, like working with the rest of the kids to get something done because it means a treat for everyone, and therefore the child, when the task is accomplished. Don't deny that negative appearing traits exist, train child to use what is perceived as negative to a have postive outcome.

Detachment from the outcome, that is the teacher of a Baha'i children's class teacher. The good and the bad. Pride in the child's accomplishment for the sake of the child, not because the teacher was the one to guide the way. The Baha'i children's teacher can expect to be with the same group of children for a few years because it is neighborhood classes, around the kitchen table, so the teacher should be fairly familiar of the child's homelife as well as culture, etc ...

O My Lord! O my Lord!
I am a child of tender years. Nourish me from the breast of Thy mercy, train me in the bosom of Thy love, educate me in the school of Thy guidance and develop me under the shadow of Thy bounty. Deliver me from darkness, make me a brilliant light; free me from unhappiness, make me a flower of the rose garden; suffer me to become a servant of Thy threshold and confer upon me the disposition and nature of the righteous; make me a cause of bounty to the human world, and crown my head with the diadem of eternal life.
Verily, Thou art the Powerful, the Mighty, the Seer, the Hearer.
- 'Abdu'l-Bahá
(Compilations, Baha'i Prayers, p. 36)

Tarabithia ALERT SPOILER!

Tarabithia hurt! And you know why? It didn't invest enough time with me to hit me like that. I felt betrayed and cheated. Expecting this retreat to a magical world instead I get kid angst, dealing with bullies and why they bully and then an emotional heart bang that was unexpected, unneeded and unearned! Sucky!

I loved our "Tarabithia." We called it? What, what did we call it all those years ago? It was up behind Shaner's old mansion on twentieth and Irving and probably incorporated a, what had to be at one time astounding, huge garden. Out of the ground would emerge a cement arm, or urn or basin. Steps that led to nowhere. Pieces of fountain were scattered. Hard, condensced bushes took on vague animal shapes. It was our world and we deeply resented it when, in our play, our world collided with lost adults as the wound their way from Cathedral Tree to the Astor Column, inevitably getting lost in the spider web of trails we knew like the back of our hands.

We would scream in delighted terror that a predator had entered our mists! Alert, alert! Hide the goods (candies, twinkies and such stolen from mothers' cubbards for fathers' lunches) flee into the thickets and brambles! "Wait, wait!" the lost adult would wail, "I'm not going to hurt you! Come back, please, come back!" Will, of course that meant he was going to hurt us! What troll tells the truth?

The adult would stomp away, muttering and swearing, words we quickly stored away and tried out on one another outside of the ears of our parental guards. One time, as we played, a man with an overgrown beard and dishevilled hair suddenly emerged and yelped, "HELP ME! I LOST! NO ENGLISH!" We were so startled, we couldn't even move. He stared at us and we stared at him, hearts racing sure we were about to be murdered by a crazed, long lost logger from the first Norwegians, or maybe a Viking, that had come to the area. Finally, it dawned on us that unless we showed him the way out he would be here forever, waiting to pounce, killing us off one by one! We led him down out of the woods and he called his thanks as he hastily made his way off the hill.

With one of our neighbors being the locally infamous Roger Miller, whose poor wife often invited us in to play in their childless home and baked us all birthday cakes, another being a doctor of questionable ethics, and the inevitible neighbor of nefarious means of making a living (it was the seventies, think about it) predators did, indeed abound. Of my own knowledge, none of these true to life boogey men "got" any of us children. One of my playmates is now in prison while another is a police officer. I wonder how that kind of thing happens? The prison inmate being a kind, compassionate child, always looking out for the youngest on our adventures in the "wild." The police officer forever taking his toys and running home whenever the game ceased going his way! As adults did they meet one another in their line of work? Did they look into one anothers' eyes and say, "Remember when we created magic together? When did our ways part?"

I loved our "Tarabithia." A magical world and time when I could do anything, be anything! Magic was not only possible nothing was possible without it. A beautiful world that we saw, I thought, together. I wonder now what others saw in Shaner's old delapitated garden?