Faces

Frederick Buechner has a lot to say about faces, and today I was listening. He writes, "Faces, like everything else, can be looked at and not seen....Every now and again, however, you come across faces that are too much for you...."
How many faces do I remember from the many students who have sat in my classroom or walked through the halls? What effect have those faces had on me? How many histories, how many personalities have I known?
Sometimes, it seems much easier to look past those faces, to not see them for the stories they tell. And yet, there are a number of faces I cannot forget, both hauntingly so and wistfully so.
People would like to reduce our profession to series of data points and student ID numbers. But we don't deal with numbers, we deal with faces and stories from the human family. When that incomprehensible variable turn into a control, only then will we be able to analyze the data coldly.