Sitting at my desk, in my room, in Jefferson House, on the first floor, in Watterson towers, next to Stevenson Hall, at Illinois State University (otherwise known as the ilstu by some students, which sounds quite ludicrous to me, but alas is rather catchy and cannot help but be repeated) I’m beginning to reflect upon numerous fantastic things I am seeing (or sometimes not seeing, but how could I reflect on something I am not seeing, seeing though if I don’t see it I obviously cannot reflect on it, unless I am reflect on seeing something that cannot be seen or is not there). I continue to reflect on what I am seeing for what I saw is amazing. I saw the kicking over of a figurative pale, spilling it’s figurative water, all over the figurative floor (which is actually tile, believe it or not). I see the lighting of a figurative fire in the eyes of the other students, of the class, in the major. I see the extraordinary fervor of people who love to learn. I see them opening their eyes, I see the spark behind those open eyes, the windows into their mind (weird how we always equate the house to a face huh?) where their thoughts reside, in a whirlpool of ideas, which only spin faster and faster until it’s released, poured out onto their papers, or released through their words, or leaked into their notes. I see them all, their frustrations, enveloped by the aforementioned thoughts, swirling in the toilet (this is the good kind of swirly, we’re cleaning the toilet bowl!) explode in a chorus of: “I don’t get it!” I also see the timid (not always though, sometimes he’s very eccentric, which might be contributed by his lack of attention on a certain topic, for, my beloved English teacher whose name rhymes with pudding, as he told us on the first day, is a quirky fellow; as that is the best euphemism I can come up with) response of “it’s a hard text!” Again, I see the frustrations of the class as I see their thoughts pool out into the world: “and that’s supposed to make it better?”
Education is not the filling of a pale, but the lighting of fire”~ William Butler Yeats
