A Teaching Life

Havel’s message is as applicable today as it was when he became the first president of the Czech Republic. Given the dismantling of our democracy, we can choose despair over hope. Despite pressures teachers are facing in their classrooms, the threats from politicians, mandates from supervisors, anger from parents and students, and impositions from state and federal authorities make it difficult to find hope.

But her classroom is her own. When she closes her door, it is “us, just us,” here together with one another. Teaching means to do good. She will do whatever she can to inculcate it into her classroom. And to do good, she must make relationships with her students her priority. Goodness cannot be told, it must be lived.

Despite the myriad of pressures from beyond her closed door, remembering her role, she pursues her relationships with her students, everyone of them. She faces all that comes at her from the outside. She’s not always right, open to learn. In the words of Havel, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Given 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 20^th 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 Blog or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.