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Mr. Rose's Site -- A Work In Progress

 

 

Work In Progress:  Welcome, students, parents, educators.  The photograph, depicting an unfinished house, is appropriately titled, “Work In Progress.”  The photo applies to The Wilson School – its staff, teachers, students, and extended family.  After all, we continue to work individually and collectively, alone and together, to improve ourselves and one another.  At different stages we all experience varying degrees of success and failure pursuing the common goal of education – to lead a better life.

          After teaching middle school, secondary school, and community school for over 15 years, I still feel like an advanced beginner.  This self-perception reminds me of one of my favorite, albeit apocryphal, anecdotes.  After years struggling for recognition, a young, hopeful, and inspiring tenor is about to realize his life-long dream, to star in an opera at La Scala, the world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy.  Fueled by nervous energy and ceaseless practice, he wows the audience after singing his first aria.  Giving him a standing ovation, the crowd explodes, with cries of “Bravo!” and “Encore!”  Finally, after his third encore with the crowd still demanding more, the exhausted tenor bends down to someone in the first row to ask, “How many more times do they want me to sing the aria?”

    “Till you get it right!”

To all who like me, see your own self as a work in progress, let me quote some lines from one of my favorite poets, E. E. Cummings:

                                        In time of daffodils who know
                                        the goal of living is to grow
                                        forgetting why
                                        remember how

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