In a couple of spare moments between parent-teacher conferences today this email heading caught my eye: Significance of the Seemingly Ordinary. It was a Daily Good article, which always begin with a quote. Here was the one from today:

As I read through the teaser paragraph I became even more intrigued. It describes a movie where the character takes a photograph of the store across the street every morning at 8 o”clock. He has 4000 photos meticulously labeled and mounted in albums. Photos that are the same…and not the same. When he shows them to a blocked writer, the writer flips through the photos quickly, not knowing what to say, says, “They’re all the same.” The photographer replies to him, “You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.” You can read more of the story here.

I found myself connecting on two different levels. The photographer in me is intrigued. Why take the same photo every day? But then again, I do find myself taking the same photos over and over again. Maybe the light is different, or the angles…or even my mood. I frequently take photos of this iconic palm tree–here’s a small sampling of my many photos of this one tree.

“One has to be in the same place every day, watch the dawn from the same house, hear the same birds awake each morning, to realize how inexhaustibly rich and different is sameness.” 

The experience of taking the same photo over and over echoes what it means to be a teacher. Each day is filled with sameness. I greet the same faces, the same small humans for nearly a year. And yet, no two days are the same. At my best, I take hundreds of mental photos of my students every day as I strive to pay attention to the nuances of their individual learning processes. I need to know them–when the sun is shining, when the fog hides their features, in a tight close up, as the sun sets.

To be a teacher is to learn to appreciate the richness and difference of sameness. And as I navigate the sometimes groundhog’s day-ness of parent-teacher conferences I find myself thinking about sameness in a different way. During each conference I am taking stock of those thousands of mental images, knowing that supporting learners (and their parents) is in the small moments. It’s in the slowing down even when the world keeps urging us to speed up. When I got behind in my conference schedule today I was tempted to cut things short, to “catch up.” But the conversations were meaningful, adding new images to my store of mental photos of my students, their families, and their learning and I know I’ll be perusing them in the weeks to come.

And now I think I’ll be looking back over my photographs to see what else I can learn–from them and about myself.