He tended young minds
“Is man free?”
Brooks Goddard is a teacher. He did not choose to be a purveyor of a publisher’s curriculum to fulfill its expectations and did not implement its lesson plans and tests. He created and prepared his own curriculum. And he had the courage to announce his mid-year exam in September.
Goddard invites us to reflect on our teachers. Did we have teachers who wanted us to conform to a set of external standards? Who were tied to a timetable that allowed for little or no discussion? Who asked us to regurgitate what they ‘taught’ in order to get a good grade? Or, were we fortunate to have teachers who asked for our thinking about what they were talking about?
We can ask similar questions about our parents and about ourselves, were we parents. To be truly inclusive, we need to see and accept others as they are and accept ourselves as well. Had you been a student in Goddard’s classroom, he would have seen you as who you were. From the first day, you would have realized that he would be looking for what you thought, what you loved, and what you cared about. He would have listened.
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Hearing about Goddard’s career invites you to consider your own. You may ask yourself, am I in the driver’s seat of my work? Or am I tethered to someone else’s expectations of me? Goddards wife, Jeannine, also a teacher, spoke for both of them: “It transforms you to teach.”
Do you feel your work life transforms you? Are you willing to be open to transformation? Do you allow your work to inform who you become? Otherwise you may be doing another’s bidding. Life is too short for that.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.” (Kierkegaard)
I write to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century. My latest book, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way is available on Amazon. And I welcome comments here on my Substack or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.
