A Teaching Life

"I would try to look at them without any preconception, the way I had first looked at the Styrofoam in the grass.” She found it nearly impossible to do because she “was so overcome by the beauty of every person in that dining hall that my eyes kept filling with tears.”

Martha Beck offers us a window through which we can acknowledge our preconceptions and look beyond them. How we can avoid judging others, always looking to spot the “quartzes” and the “Styrofoams?” We see ‘good’ ones, ‘cooperative’ ones. And notice the potentially ‘difficult’ people, perhaps dressed in baggy clothes, hair askew, tattooed, looking downtrodden. Will we be projecting our cognitive prejudices?

We may have seen a person as Styrofoam only later to see her as quartz. How can we stay open to see her and each person from the first moment as she is? To look for who she is no matter how she appears? Were we not to judge and sustain this practice, will our eyes be filled with tears?

Teachers can practice Beck’s perspective. As students enter their classroom, they can observe each as they are, not thinking who they might be. And not drop their guard until all have come in. And try it again the next day, the next, and the next.

After a few weeks invoking “to look at them without any preconception,” will they notice any differences in their teaching? In relationships with colleagues and administration? And, in relationship with themselves?

We all could emulate such teachers, suspending judgment in this time of divisiveness, of separation, of hate for some of us. We would be emulating, in Ken Burns words, “We the people. Just us. No other.”

Given that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” (Kierkegaard), I write this Blog to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher in the latter half of the 20^th century to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century.