“Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the springs of life.”
You know, all my degrees, titles, positions, publications, workshops, and grants don’t approach being all there is of me. They are only a part of my being. They sure aren’t the whole of my wholeness. In fact, they are the least of me, for we all, as James Allen said, are great or small according to our controlling desires or dominant aspirations. Our unconditional faith, hope, and love for both ourselves and others should be a dais for being the larger person.
The academic culture, which puts up distancing, disconnecting, and disinteresting walls and barriers of disheartening “objectivity,” that focuses on credentialing, that almost promotes a social phobia, that doesn’t recognize education as a “people business,” however, has not caught up with the research on teaching and learning. Just one example is Stanford’s Clifton Parker and Gregory Watson who found that a central tenet of teaching is to build an empathic-mindset in teachers, if for no other reason than empathy, a better understanding of and relationships with each student, a compunction to be kind, better connects the teacher with each student, supports and encourages the teacher and each student, and improves the teacher’s and each student’s behavior and performance. I was recently reminded by three students I chanced to meet separately over the last few days, who had been in class with me that last fall semester before I retired, that the great feat of making a difference comes from one’s humanity within, from making an altruistic commitment of serving others, not from a self-centered lengthening of a resume, getting a promotion, achieving tenure, or acquiring more zeros on our salary.
By seeing and listening to students through a moral lens that reveals our own human quirks, habits, faults, and fears, we are better able to be empathetic to the faults and fears of others; we can stand in their shoes; and, although we may not agree with them, we can perceive the world through their eyes; and, we can appreciate and validate their point of view. When, with a certainly, we judge, abstract, stereotype, generalize, or label the individual and unique humanity out of students, however, we leave ourselves little room for faith, hope, love, respect, kindness, and caring for each. Only by being honest with our own story, can we really begin to understand what other may be going through. While we need to see ourselves clearly, that doesn’t mean we obsess over our faults; it means we learn from them and about others. Trust me, that is not an easy task, and it can be at first painful.
To do this, as the Zen saying goes, we must simultaneously sit and rake the garden. Outside and inside the classroom, we must quiet our mind, stop and listen, stop and see, soften our spirit, and open our heart. To discover ourself and others is, as this proverb says, loving self-kindness, and we sense the need for connection to help others do the same; we offer because others are part of us and what we are doing. To put it in classroom terms, there is no teacher without a student and no student without a teacher. They go hand-in-hand. Then, we will have learned to see the hidden beauty in the ordinary. As Rumi said, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” I say there are as many ways as there are students in a classroom. We will nurture new energies, leave worn and accepted paths, strike out on new ones and help others do likewise, and still feel comfortable and safe. We will see beyond the sights; listen beyond the sounds; go behind and between the words and body movements; notice the pregnant silence. We will become intensely interested; become curious; pay attention; shun assumption and presumption; slowly walk rather than jump to conclusions; anticipate less. We’ll be receptive to surprise and delight; seize on the unpredictable; notice the unique; go for potential; we see into the future and imagine what can become. To do all this are acts of faith, hope, and love; they’re acts of respect and of giving a damn; they imbue individual dignity, nobility, and sacredness. If we know her or him, if we know her or his story. If we know a few peculiarities about a student, then, it is hard, almost impossible, to do a life-sucking-out assault on her or his sacredness, to jump to conclusions and rush to judgment, and turn her or him into a flattened, lifeless anonymity of abstraction, stereotype, generality, or label. When we do that, as these three students just reminded me, we will be surrounded by a field of exciting possibilities. And, then, you enjoy it all.
“Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the springs of life.”
Louis