This past week I sat across from a student who, after three unproductive years, was entering their senior year already defeated by time. The weight of missed credits, absences, and disruptions finally pressed too heavy against the fragile system designed to support them. It fell to me to say the words no teacher wants to say: there was no longer enough time to finish high school. I watched them absorb it in silence—the flicker of hope extinguished, the burden settling in its place. These are the conversations that leave me hollow.
When I later returned to Christen Brun’s A Basket of Ribbons (1869), I saw that student again, transfigured on canvas. The girl Brun painted leans against a cold stone wall, chin resting on her hand, eyes dulled by the exhaustion of youth cut short. Beside her sits a basket of bright ribbons, tokens of beauty she cannot claim. Her role is not to adorn but to sell, not to flourish but to survive. There is no sweetness in her face, no sentimental glow. Only the look of someone who has already learned that the world can take more than it gives.
For me, the basket becomes a metaphor for the lives of so many students I’ve met—full of color and possibility, yet heavy, burdensome, sold off piece by piece just to get by. They carry talents and dreams, but the weight of poverty, trauma, or neglect strips away the time they need to let those things unfold. And like Brun’s girl, they often sit in silence, staring outward, unwilling or unable to dress their pain in something palatable for others.
Brun was not only a painter but a teacher himself. For two decades he taught at the Royal Drawing School in Christiania, where among his students was Harriet Backer, who would become one of Norway’s most celebrated painters. His role was to nurture talent, to coax out the hidden possibilities within young artists, to help them see themselves as creators in a world that might not otherwise have made space for them. In his paintings, he gave dignity to those overlooked by society. In his classroom, he offered tools and structure to help young people step into their own visions. That dual vocation—artist and teacher—gives A Basket of Ribbons an added weight for me. It is not just the portrait of a weary street-seller; it is a testimony from someone who had lived his life in the company of the young, and who knew how fragile their futures could be.
The cost of working in alternative education is not just measured in hours or energy but in what lingers after such conversations. There is a term for it—secondary trauma—the toll taken when you absorb the grief and despair of others. Brun’s painting feels like a portrait of that toll. Not only for the girl on the steps, but for anyone who has sat with her, seen her weariness, and felt powerless to change it.
Parker Palmer once wrote, “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.” But integrity does not shield one from sorrow; it draws you into it. To teach with integrity is to enter the desert with your students, even knowing you cannot lead them all out. Brun’s classroom, like mine, must have been filled with both promise and heartbreak—students who flourished, and others who faltered. His painting offers no easy redemption, no softened edges—only the raw dignity of presence.
Maxine Greene reminds us that imagination is central to education. “We must learn to look at things as if they could be otherwise,” she wrote, pressing us to see beyond what is fixed. When I imagine my students otherwise, I refuse to reduce them to transcripts or credits. I see what they might become, even when their time with me ends unfinished. Brun’s girl, too, can be imagined otherwise—her tired eyes lighting with mischief, her basket of ribbons no longer a burden but a delight. Imagination does not erase reality, but it gives both teacher and student a way to hold possibility alongside despair.
And Henri Nouwen, writing about compassion, observed, “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish.” Teaching in alternative education is precisely this: going where it hurts, not because we can always fix it, but because to abandon the hurting would be to abandon our humanity. Brun’s painting insists on this kind of compassion—not sentimental pity, but the courage to sit with sorrow and still call it worthy of being seen.
I think of that student now, and of the girl with the basket of ribbons. Both remind me that education is not always about success measured in diplomas or finished credits. Sometimes it is about the witness—about being with someone honestly in the moment their struggle becomes too heavy to carry further. That is what Brun captured, and it is what teaching demands. It costs something, yes. But it is also, in its own quiet way, an act of grace.
And so I return to the canvas. The girl sits still, ribbons at her side, chin pressed into her palm. She has not moved, yet I see her differently now. Not as an emblem of failure, but as a presence that refuses erasure. Perhaps Brun understood what every teacher eventually learns—that even in weariness, there is a dignity that endures.