At the close of school last year, a student who had tested my patience daily with her recalcitrance wrote me a note, which read: "You always had good things to say about me even when I was bad, and that's why you are my favorite teach."

That reinforced a lesson I had learned early in my teaching career: Aim for the heart.

Kindness is a powerful weapon that carries the potential to take the sting out of a formidable foe, or to bring a burst of sunshine to a fuliginous region.

I am reminded here of a woman who, after being held hostage in her own home by an escaped convict, was able to convince her captor to surrender to authorities.

As details of the miracle emerged, it became abundantly clear that the genuine kindness that the victim had shown toward the killer -- a kindness that he had experienced for the first time in his life -- had caused his heart to beat differently.

Mahatma Gandhi's brand of nonviolence furnished him with the courage and morality to embrace his detractors even when they imprisoned him.

Kindness moves from commonality to exalted status as soon as it becomes qualified by the word "genuine."

It is my belief that children, who have pure hearts and uncomplicated registers of mind, can sense genuine kindness instinctively.

They may not always know how to respond to it reciprocally, but as the river flows, they will come to a place by and by where the mark left by the kindness announces itself.

In the teaching field, kindness, which is roomier and more accepting of students' peccadilloes, is sometimes painted with a pejorative brush.

A teacher who has a passion for teaching and is well-versed in the topic of instruction is sine qua non for education. However, a kind heart takes students to a larger realm where knowledge is wedded to humanity and real things.

"Power has no authority in the region of intellect and morals," wrote Mark Van Doren in "The Arts of Teaching and Being Taught."

But kindness does.

The power that teachers wield, in its raw manifestation, can keep children seat-bound and work-focused, but it cannot bring "the detail, the color, the time, the air, the life which makes it (study) live in us."

Van Doren pointed to another truth in his essay: "The good teacher is a man whose conversation is never finished, partly because it is about real things, and so cannot be finished."

The sway and swish of real things are pervasive. The heart enters every discourse and discovery in education, and it matters not whether the lesson is centered on a poem by Pablo Neruda or an equation in quantum mechanics.

The good teacher takes his students down the river of knowledge, but does not ignore the songbird's melody that issues forth from the journey's shorelines.

**Ramnath Subramanian, a sixth-grade science teacher at Eastwood Knolls School in El Paso, writes for the El Paso Times on educational topics. E-mail address: ramnath10@aol.com