Keep Your Lights On

As a professional private tutor, I get to witness a good amount of lights in my students’ eyes.

After writing that last sentence, which uses a metaphorical idiom that I feel I use more than most people, I headed to my most trusted (hah!) online search engine to run a quick scan of the phrase “lights in the eyes.”

Bad move. That search merely revealed countless pages of medical symptoms—like floaters and flashes—and, of course, the litany of enumerated malaises with which such symptoms are associated.

If your mind is anything like mine, then you’ll understand why I got distracted, or perhaps inspired, by these unexpected search results, finding myself following a hyperlink that provoked me to learn more about the composition of the vitreous gel between the lens and the retina of the eye.

In case you’re wondering, well—not unlike most things in the body—it’s composed of mostly water, though it also contains some salts and sugars, proteins and amino acids, and the odd collagen fiber. This vitreous humor (the formal name for the gel) is the material within the eye that causes those aforementioned floaters, and, now that I’m getting older, the normal degree of vitreous degeneration will apparently lead to my increased experience of such symptoms.

And boom, now I’m learning—thus, lights in my eyes! I mean that figuratively, of course; however, as my search results and subsequent rabbit hole revealed, I guess I also mean it quite literally. I hope you’re learning, too. Learning what, you ask? That learning itself is easy when the circumstances are relaxed, the tools powerful, and the information abundant. At Keep Your Book Open, those are just some of the criteria for a positive learning environment.

Our job is to keep the lights on in your student’s eyes. Your job is to keep the lights on in our offices. Join the KYBO Club. Steer the conversation. Beat the tests.