"A Square plus B Square....."

With only three weeks of school left, yesterday may have been my last opportunity to substitute at the church school until it all starts over again in August. Eight days since the first of the year isn’t a whole lot of anything; but there’s been some tutoring beyond that and enough encounter with the kids that, for the most part, they all know me and vice-versa. Names take a while, especially when it’s an every other week, one day here and there affair. My elementary introduction involved only the Fifth Grade and the Kindergarten “l’il diddles”. The upper learning center was more a continual recycling of faces. The human element, however, is the same on both sides of how our educational system divides the journey. Every class has its clown, its beauty queen, its jock, and a few who are actually there to learn. Cliques form. The future is being shaped here in more ways than one. If maturity is defined by one’s engagement with the world around us and not just a growth in stature, then this arena provides ample witness to just how diverse that product is achieved in such short space as that between enrollment and graduation a little more than a decade later. Then, again, I wonder how any of us look to God, in that department, after another such milepost, then another, and another, has been reached. What does “full development” or, as my dictionary expresses it in other terms, “the date when an obligation becomes due” really mean in terms of Judgment Day? For this old man it all comes down to this: There’s a whole lot more to us than merely the exterior veneer we present unto others in the unfolding of this story. Who we are and what we are evolves out of our roots and life as it comes to us. My approach, therefore, to this privilege granted me, is more than making scholars out of students. I want to see deeper than just the individual seated at a table before me. My prayer is to find His flow and His wisdom that somehow much more than solving an Algebra problem takes place. It looks good at the moment for a full six week sometime in September, maybe earlier, filling in for an expectant mother who teaches Chemistry. Summer is welcomed in all that it brings; but, already, I’m anxious for the next bunch…….