Weight of Honor
How Noble Coins unbalance the living scales of a teacher's life
by
D’fils
by
D’fils
Several weeks ago a student came in to my algebra class and gave me an apple. It was a little red thing. I loved how it shined in several places with white beryl spickles of importances as it used the white fluorescent lights overhead to produce its own kind of explanations marks. Obviously this was the old ‘apple for the Teacher’ setup, and I was smiled-on by the gesture because here in my hand was an attractive, mannerable, and quietest of cafeteria lunch apples which had come from the hand of the quietest and most mannerable young man in the class. It was his genuine soft spoken kind of smile that attended the offer which automatically guaranteed my acceptance of the setup.
For several moments I kept his smile on my face—the one he caused by his contrastive act—not because I was stuck and didn’t know how to receive the apple, or had any trouble whatever regarding the student’s readable thought behind the red thing. It was that subtle thread of intention that this smile had started into action; it was that sharp surprise that had hung in the room that was filling with other arriving students. In seriousness, most American students didn’t bother with the old ‘apple for the teacher’ bit; it had fallen out many years ago. Yet there Nabil had stood, saying with his small English, ‘for you’, --and immediately following, my chest feeling the jolt of his javelin-of-sincerity.
What I now held was his coin–his way of saying without poster, or American greeting card, or fruit basket, how much my gentle teaching had meant to him thus far. Over and over, his ‘weight of honor’ chic-chinged in my hand, rippling repeatedly up the radial nerve of my arm into my heart.
My palm wrapped and unwrapped the smooth skin of that fruit and my sensors kept measuring and unmeasuring its mass while my mind pondered what do with this tiny treasure. It was too unsafe to leave out on my teacher desk, and too bulging for my work pocket; my gut idea for the apple was to eat it in only three half-bites. At that moment, mixed with all these mental math-charts, was the truth that all the thoughts that now graphed and thickened inside of me were too valuable to let go of. The longing I now grieved with was: how to preserve the memory of the weight of the honor I experienced, for I now felt an unsurpassed increase in my ‘pocket weight’: In that one moment in time, I had been made more valuable inside.
So I guarded the apple and at the end of the day I took it home. By pondering and reverie I now knew what I would do with it. I would make it memorable, so that neither he nor I would forget that day, and that honest likeable gift of cherishable thought. I would do this simple writing to make this learning child famous in his new American world. Was he aware that he had created a new currency (in our relationship, at least)? Oh, the usual currency still stayed there between teacher and student, but now because of his brilliant offer he had fashioned a new and improved form of legal tender—without house bill, committee delays or even a trudging preamble of senatorial dictaphone of words. The whole brief experience was just the quiet act of a frail young man, handing over ‘weight of honor’ in a song without too many words that whispered, ‘You’re my very favorite teacher.’
That's your apple in the picture, Nabil!