Every Wednesday afternoon, just after lunch, in my second-grade classroom we look at a painting from a great painter of the past. I say we look, but I often am left with the feeling that I have scarcely attended to the painting at all. Did you know that in Manet’s The Railway there are eleven railings, that there is a puppy – or is it a guinea pig – in the lap of the woman sitting on the wall? There are grapes on the ledge too. There is a daisy on her hat, and Mr. Payne, does the girl have cherries as earrings? Of course, I didn’t spot any of these particular features, even if I thought that I was looking with as much attention to detail as they were.

Children, in my experience, help us to see differently, even to see rightly. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer framed it when referring to our incapacity to view the world the right way up: “It’s our eyes that are at fault.” In my first year of full-time teaching, the resounding and constant lesson I have learned is how to really look at the world.

Adults living in secular modernity operate in two modes that pervade much cultural output and our responding discourse. These are irony and despair. Much of our discussion, online and off, is saturated by these two modes. We cannot ever really take things seriously, nor do we have any coherent understanding of why real and grounded hope might be important for our flourishing. In contrast, the children I have worked with help adults like me by modeling examples of what author Christy Wampole terms non-ironic living. Describing irony as a kind of veil that we all adopt, she notes how as adults we need to recultivate habits of sincerity, humility, and forthrightness. These, of course, are habits that anyone who works with children knows they have in abundance.

The university culture I was in prior to teaching elementary school does not prioritize the values of hopefulness and non-irony. It is wary of confession, of vulnerability. The things that make for more human encounters are shunned in favor of things that dehumanize us. As I have pursued part-time academic research alongside teaching, I have found that, to a large extent, my theories and efforts are in vain. I cannot manufacture and generate by my own thinking the results I expect the children to produce. Often my visions and ideals of what I expect children to do or be, or how they should behave, flounder on the rocks of their actual actions and being and behavior. Cambridge, so known for its theories and theorizing, is confronted by the living, laughing, challenging child.

With my mentor at school, we refer regularly to “the green paint incident.” It forms a rather interesting hinge point in my first term as a teacher. I went into what I hoped would be a straightforward and wholesome craft afternoon with seven-year-olds, with visions of the children taking home tidy creations they had worked on. Instead, when I turned my back halfway through the lesson, two boys placed their hands in the paint and walked toward each other, hands outstretched, rather like two small zombies, with the paint on the fronts of their uniforms. Worse still, it was all over the blazer sleeves of the group working away in the corner. These woolen blazers, new and expensive, do not wash, and green acrylic paint does not wash out anyway. I quickly terminated the activity, and all that we were left with was a very green working space, and a very stressed and embarrassed teacher.

Much of my own learning from the last year has come from breaking down my own self-seriousness.

Between doses of humble pie, I have often been struck by another virtue, very present in many of those I teach: hopeful attention. It is in contrast to the pervasive norm of despair found among so many adults. I feel especially grateful that the school I work in prioritizes a certain kind of attentiveness. The habits and virtues we seek to cultivate within the small persons in our care emphasize our capacity to really pay attention to what it is we have in front of us. This capacity to attend goes hand in hand with another of the childlike virtues – wonder. On one of my students’ biweekly nature walks, suddenly a young girl dove into the reeds and came out with a toad in each hand. The pure delight and surprise of the occasion was completely captivating for all the other children present. Their joy at the ordinary, their capacity to be captured by “every riven thing” is a completely different attitude from my own functional indifference.

As much as it is right that we cultivate sincerity and forthrightness, I have found that much of my own learning from the last year has come from confronting my own incompetence and breaking down my own self-seriousness. Children are quick to show their boredom, confusion, or displeasure at whatever perfectly thought-through lesson planning you have done. The novelty of the feeling of conscious incompetence is painful, and encountering it alongside children a quarter your age is a rather humbling experience. Nevertheless, this is a long-term kindness. If the text we are reading has lost their interest, they are more than happy to let me know; if the afternoon task we are working on is not engaging, it will become apparent almost as soon as I have turned my back. These are all self-evident reminders of my own shortcomings in the role. But so, too, is the clarity of the joy on their faces when they are delighted by the work they are doing, or their laughter at a joke, or the reward of a whole class of gripped expressions, waiting eagerly for the next chapter of a great book.

For all the strengths and joys of teaching, it is nonetheless riddled with challenges and difficulties. My immune system has never really caught up since the start of the school year, and there are the long winter months of dark commutes, colds, and drenched children traipsing back into my room for another lesson on fractions.

There is also the feeling of powerlessness in my inability to shape or mold a child in the way I wish to. The weight of working with beings who are in an evident state of becoming is that I see how much their development and flourishing hinges on so many different possibilities and paths, and occasionally it is overwhelming to consider that I am one of the people who is most influencing this trajectory. And yet as much as I would like to determine the direction of travel for the young people in the classroom, they will never progress in exactly the way I envision, but instead, continue to surprise me. To quote Gerard Manley Hopkins: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” A good educator should allow this to surface, to help children to flourish into the persons they were made to be.

Several years before I started to teach, I read this excerpt from G. K. Chesterton, which now comes to me nearly every day that I walk into my classroom. As I look forward to the work ahead, I know I need to ask God for a correct posture of attentiveness to the children in my care.

It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy.… They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The defense that irony allows cannot withstand the piercing insights of the seven-year-old. As Wampole says, to live ironically is “to hide in public.” Non-irony is risky, the risks of allowing the other to behold you, warts and all. Irony is a kind of defeat, a weariness at the world. The child has not internalized this logic. In order to participate most fully in the world, we must cultivate joyful sincerity, humility and self-effacement. We must take account of the “abounding vitality” that exists in young children.

If I can look back on my first years of teaching knowing that in some way the children in my care have left with a fuller vision of reality, and that their capacity for vitality remains, then I will have done my duty to them. If they haven’t, then I think it has been worth the trying. I know for certain that they have enlarged my own vision, and helped me to see more clearly.