It just occurred to me that one of the great joys in teaching high school for over thirty years was in finding students who were far brighter than I am.  They were always polite about it, because I had the armaments of age and study to wield as cudgels if they ever got too saucy with me. Once a very bright student disputed evolution with me, and I used the Gulf Current and the tropical orchids that grow in the Ireland’s west country to bring his argument gently to earth–but those weapons were things I deployed warily, because I didn’t trust myself with them.

The best alternative to cudgels that I had to offer students who were that bright was the perspective that comes from learning, and communicating, empathy for people neither they nor I would ever meet: Scots women condemned as witches; the terror of German Catholics dying brutal deaths in the 17th-century Sack of Magdeburg;  the defiance of Parisians who stood as straight as soldiers in the face of the artillery fire that destroyed their barricades; the barbarity of spousal abuse, revealed in the deaths of working-class London women grimly recorded in the archives of the Old Bailey’s criminal courts;  the outrage of poilus in mutiny in 1917 France, demanding, and claiming, the citizenship that had rightly belonged to them since 1789; the joy of Berliners in 1947, waving scarves and handkerchiefs at C-47’s when those planes, bearing food and fuel, flew so low that their their wheel-carriages brushed tenement rooftops.

You don’t teach brilliant kids: You show them the course, as if they were Winter Olympics bobsled teams, and you gently nudge them when they run too close to the banks at the course’s edge. You coach them, point the path ahead for them, and then you let them run as fast as they can.

If all you see of them, in the school year when they are yours, is the blur of their passing, it is a sight that remains with you the rest of your life.