teaching is hard to put on paper

I heard a very beautiful thought yesterday, that I will struggle to put down here.

We were in a curriculum mapping meeting kvetching about how difficult it is to put "gifted" onto paper. By that we meant all the little things we do every day to teach our students, but that don't make it into the very linear, uncompromising map. *bleah* In the end, if you read a map, it often looks very flat and lifeless, there is very little there to show all the myriad things we do to bring class to life.

Our facilitator told us that it isn't just gifted that is hard to put on paper, it is teaching. Teaching, she said, is an art. Our classes are our paintings. The map is perhaps the easel and the paint itself, but the students and the classes are the paintings. There is no way to translate that artwork into words. There is no way another person can walk into our classroom and recreate that same artwork. They can pick up the canvas and the paint and make their own artwork, but it will never be the same as what we create.

So here's to creating beautiful artwork, and to finding a way to put all the paint, canvases and easels in an organized place for the next artist to find :)