Whenever I come to the end of a school year, my mind drifts to the sad reality that, after Thursday, I will never see many of you again. Even those of you who continue to brighten my days with friendly hellos from across the fence or short visits to my classroom will be largely outside my sphere of influence. In other words, I’m facing my last few precious opportunities to do that thing which I love doing most—that is, to teach you.

The end of something is always hard. We must remember, though, that a thing does not have to go on forever in order to be valuable. Old Dan and Little Ann taught us that. In fact, the less we have of something, the more valuable it becomes. Near the end, we are forced to number our days and are given a new sense of urgency as we desperately seek to use our time as wisely as possible. And so, for me, my all-consuming question during the last days of school becomes: “What do I most want to teach my students?”

Now I know what you all must be thinking. “Here Mr. Kiehne goes again, repeating for the 100th time some writing or grammar thing that I already wake up having nightmares about”. Things like: paragraphs have a “purpose”. Or, A clincher “repeats or reflects the central fact”.

But as important as those and many other lessons have been, none of them rise to the top. The most important lesson, as usual, comes from Literature class. What is most important is that you learn to be good and noble—that you learn to be a hero.

For those who don’t know, being a hero does not involve magical wardrobes, secret gardens, tesseracts, or even special dogs. You do not need magic, advanced technology, popularity, power, influence, intelligence, athletic ability, or any extraordinary skills. When Meg and her friends learn how to fight against IT, they discover they have some rather odd allies who have been fighting against this darkness with them: Storytellers, scientists, musicians, artists, and yes, even mathematicians, to name a few. These people were not fellow fighters of the darkness because they had a cool weapon or commanded giant armies, but because in whatever they did, they sought to bring Truth, Goodness, and Beauty into the world. Whenever you do this, no matter how small and no matter the circumstance, you are fighting the darkness. Here are a few things you’ve done this year and that I hope you continue to do, which help fight the darkness, whether you realize it or not:

• Persevering through a math problem to find the true solution
• Discovering or sharing a scientific or historical fact about the universe
• Writing down kind things you noticed about a classmate
• Getting in front of the class to recite a poem, or raising your hand to share an answer, or apologizing for a wrong choice you made, or any other time you showed courage in the face of something that scared you
• Writing with beautiful cursive handwriting
• Spending time to make a sentence sound as beautiful as possible
• Singing a beautiful song or creating a beautiful peace of artwork or finishing a beautiful athletic feat or saying a beautiful French phrase

Throughout the year, so many of you have been handed stickers from teachers to recognize your virtue. But I want you to know that people don’t have to notice your acts of virtue in order for them to matter. In fact, I would argue that it is the virtuous acts that no one ever noticed that mattered the most this year. As Aesop said, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

This is why I’ve told you all year long that I do not care how you act while you are in my room, while I, or another teacher, or a parent is watching you. I care who you are when no one is watching, because that is who you truly are. Noble heroes are not made in the public, extravagant deeds, but in the quiet, little choices to do what is right. Nothing is small or insignificant that is done with virtue. The Little Prince’s flower mattered—in fact, it was everything—even though no one knew about her besides the Prince himself.

So as you move on to 6th grade, high school, and the rest of your lives, if I could have just one lesson  stick with you, it would be this: Pursue and create and appreciate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, wherever and however you can. And as you get lost in these eternal things, these things that are bigger than you or me or anyone else here, these things that help us to forget ourselves for the sake of something better, don’t be surprised if you, like Lucy when she saw Aslan, suddenly become—though you might not know it—the most beautiful person in the world: a hero.

Photo by Matthias Wagner on Unsplash