God, these last few weeks have been a struggle. Things have a way of arriving unannounced. But, there is an upside to this inner and outer struggle. It has made me look deeper into myself as a teacher and ask, “As a teacher, who am I?” Here’s my answer. If I am merely a classroom manager, I accept the status quo of a host of “I am.” On the other hand, if I see myself as a classroom leader, I dispute the validity of the status quo and refuse to become like or submit to “the system” with a host of challenging and often annoying “You can become” and “You are better than that” and “You can do it.” I don’t clutch “this is how it has always been done” so tightly that I can’t embrace newness. As a teacher, I am a discriminating iconoclast. I have a selective irreverence. I am restlessness with the paralyzing “I can’t,” discontent with the atrophying “I am not,” unsatisfied with the halting “It’s too hard.” My refusals to accept those fearfully disguised “no’s,” my beliefs in “yeses,” as Thomas Edison might have said, are the necessities for getting out of the ruts of complacency, certainty, resignation, sedentariness, and stasis–and even despair. And, if you’re worrying about critics, about what “they” will think, well, they just prove you’re doing something worthwhile.
I mean, damn! Rumi said, “Observe the wonders as they occur around you.” Not to be filled with joy in that classroom is one of the great sins in academia. In that classroom before us are potentials so many and so great we and they can’t imagine them. This is a place overflowing with possibilities. This is a place heaped with opportunities. This is the future! To know all that, to understand that, to be understood, my teacher’s eyes, mind, and especially heart, have to be like parachutes, for they function properly only when they are open. And, when they are open–open to all without exception and without condition–they offer faith, hope, support, encouragement, and love. I know when I am open, I am assured that I’ll never grow old; I may die of old age, but I’ll die young; and, my teaching will never get old. We have to open our inner tap and let that faith, belief, hope, and love flow vibrantly out from us. To succeed, we first have to believe in each student–in each student; we have to help each student–each student–believe. No teacher has the right to give up on any student. I’ll repeat that: no teacher has the right to give up on any student. Wasn’t it Buddha who said, “If we could see the miracle in single flower clearly, our whole life would change?” What if we saw such a miracle in a so-called “average student?” What if we saw an angel walking before each student, proclaiming, “Make way! Make way! Make way for someone created in the image of God?” A strong positive belief in a student will create more miracles than any “wonder” technology, publication, or grant. That understanding has to be lived, not merely spoken. St. Francis of Assisi was right, it’s no use preaching unless our walking is our preaching. After all, reputations are not built on what you say you should do or what you’re going to do.
If we fail to embrace the opportunity, we lose the prize; we lose the student. We have to focus on that place, on the classroom, not just on the lab and archive and publishing house. Why? Well, “What the mind of man creates,” said Edison, “his character controls.” Because that’s the prize: to do whatever it takes–whatever it takes–to help each student open her or his eyes, mind, and heart so she or he can see where she or he will be, not where they have been or are; that there are no short cuts to any meaningful place; to help them see just how noble and sacred and valuable they are whatever their GPA, their gender, their religion, their race, their ethnicity, their sexual preference, their whatever; to help them see that living a life of integrity is the greatest lesson to learn; to help them to understand that the whole of existence is change and process, that life is change and process, and each of us is change and process; but, also understand that while achievement is not certain, failure is not final. As I have said so often, we have to help them learn that they are “human becomings,” not just “human beings.
The most important thing I, as a teacher, can do in a classroom, then, is to do something that will outlast and go beyond both me, the physical confines of the classroom, the restrictions of the class subject, and time limits of the term. And, that is to show that belief is more powerful than interest; that all in life is an experiment; that all in life is choice; that while you seldom get to choose how you die; you always choose how to live; that there is no guarantee and absolute security; that there is no perfection; that there is only opportunity and possibility; and that with self-confidence, self-esteem, self-respect, commitment, dedication, perseverance, and sweat supposedly average people can do the work of supposedly superior people.
Louis
You have put into words what I feel in my heart about the work I do as a first grade teacher. You are “gifted” to communicate what some feel but can’t explain; our compassion, even obsession to teach, not to others, but perhaps, not even to ourselves. You have read my mind and my heart. Thank you.
Rose, thank you for your kind words. I will say this: my first principle of teaching is love. Twenty-two years ago I wrote this which I believe more now than I did then: “Now, when I say, “teaching is love,” I don’t mean ardently embracing my subject or tightly hugging to my cheek the stuff in print or having a passion to be in the classroom or having a fire for learning or having an excitement for ideas or having a fervent commitment to a particular method, technology, and philosophy. When I say “teaching is love,” I mean the kind of habit of the heart that intoxicates me with students; I mean the habit of the spirit that holds up every individual student before me as a unique, miraculous, and sacred creation; I mean the habit of mind that proclaims that every student is important and valuable. When I say “teaching is love,” I’m talking about the wellspring of my respect for, valuing of, caring about, and concern for each student so that I enter each classroom each day as a practioner of inclusion rather than exclusion.
To say that teaching is love is to believe in the best of people, in their unique potential, and to never stop finding ways to get each of them to believe. To inseparably connect teaching and love is to insure that every moment I teach is a moment, that teaching a sensation rather than a performance. To talk of love is to get fired up about people and get them to light the fires within themselves. To talk of love requires that I respect each student, that I assume a responsibility for the well-being and success of each student, that I value each student–and I never want to lose something of value. Love will not allow me to give up the fight for each studentþs right to succeed. It gives me strength to help students discover their strengths. It rushes me into illumination, struggling to turn what is too often a darkening, foreboding, painful, boring dungeon of a classroom into a lighted, enjoyable, exciting, uplifting cathedral of the spirit. To talk of love in the same breath with teaching is to make the classroom into an inviting oasis where I welcome–and at time, lure–all to come to nourish their souls, spirits, and minds. To talk of love in the same breath as teaching is to talk of constant newness, daily discovery and creation, with all of its dazzling color and splendor.
To be sure, I am an academician. I am an educator. I am an intellectual. I am a scholar. I am a man of books and ideas. I make no apologies for that. But, if I am not first and lastly a person who loves other people, if I am not a standard-bearer holding high the banner for humanity, I am nothing and what I do matters little. To say that teaching is love requires I look at each student with awe and wonder and never lets me stop for any reason to get all students to awe and wonder about themselves; it requires that I never let any student go nameless, faceless, hide in the shadows, be alone in the crowd; it demands I dream about each student and never let’s anything stop me from trying to get each of them to dream about themselves; love is believing that each student is a treasure chest of breathtaking “yeses!” and awesome”wows!” and incredible “ooohs” and amazing “aaahs”, and doing whatever it takes to help them unlock that chest, lift open the lid, peer into the rich contents, and reach into to grab hold of that prize cache.
I find that love is the cause of more miracles than is method and technology; it is the source of more successes than grades and test scores and honors; it is more infectious than is the intellect. It, rushes into the lungs, flows in the veins, gets down into the bones, enters lives, and touches the soul. When we truly live love–not just mouth it–as the first principle of teaching in the classroom, the chance of what we say and do has a better chance of taking root and staying; when we truly live love as the first principle in the classroom the chance of what we touch has a better chance of sticking.
The power of love doesn’t abate; it’s influence never stops. Like the pink Ever-ready bunny, it keeps going on and on and on and on. It keeps echoing and reverberating in students’ hearts–it keeps shouting an awakening “Boo” in their souls and minds–long after the sounds of a lecture have died away and the print on test scores has faded out…Teaching IS love. Without it my classroom would be as cold and stiffening as those icebox outside–as it once was. It is that simple. And yet, it is not that plain. Like the beautiful grain of exposed wood, it is that humanly magnificent and that humanly complex.
Louis