A Teaching Life

A famous lecturer at Cornell who popularized the “power nap,” professor Jim Maas was my classmate in college. His university teaching venue was antithetical to mine: in a lecture hall reaching 1500 students a semester. He became famous. His book Power Sleep, a best seller.

In reading his obituary, his colleague and friend recounted, “Some teachers think that their goal is to recite information. I think Jim felt his goal was to excite with that information, so that teaching was a dialogue and a conversation.”

My first reaction to his comment was that it reflected two aspects of my life.

Thich Nhat Hanh wisely said, “Sometime, somewhere, you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it.”

To illustrate, he tells the Buddha’s story of a young widower, who was away on business when bandits burned down his village and took away his son. Deeply distressed and panicked, he found a corpse of an infant believing it was his son. For years he lamented his loss, carrying a velvet bag of the ashes.

But his son escaped from the robbers and years later knocked at his father’s door.

Ichigo Ichie (ichi-go, ichi-eh) is a Japanese phrase that translates as “once, a meeting…at this time, an opportunity.” Each moment and everything we experience is a unique treasure never to be repeated. If we let it slip away without enjoying it, that moment will be lost, lost forever.

Imagine being present with Japanese masters whose tea ceremonies were once a meeting…at this time an opportunity, one moment in life that will never happen again. Each moment never to reoccur, never repeated. Yet we plan our days. We may or we may not pay attention, yet each one will be different, unique.

Yo-Yo Ma in an interview addressed his understanding of culture, as “everything that humans have invented that helped us survive and thrive and gives meaning.” I couldn’t agree more. In my classroom, whether I brought in others’ ideas or my own, they allowed us to “survive and thrive.” Meaning was always my goal. Why teach just to pass on information when we could dig deeper, explore implications, be surprised, discover insights.

There were days when I would provide knowledge. But only as a foundation.

When I read David Brooks in the NYT in September, “Today most of our problems are moral, relational and spiritual more than they are economic,” I immediately agreed. As a teacher, my life was never about economics. I received a salary, low as it was, and made it work, sometimes supplementing it. I saw myself––perhaps I did not articulate it at the time––as bringing knowledge and good into the lives of my students. I often thought of the larger purpose of my work. I was deeply aware of impacting the lives of young people.

In occasional moments, I hear from students years later or on Facebook.

Wisdom from W.H. Murray, Scottish mountaineer,

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness… the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too.

We may perceive as teachers that we teach in a resistance environment stemming from veterans,’ ‘we don’t do that around here.’ We might feel a “hesitancy, the chance to draw back” the curtain, an Oz in our classroom. But the moment we commit to what we know to be true, we part the curtain and find that “providence moves” with us.

The only thing you can grow is the thing you give energy to. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

We likely believe we have grown up into who we’ve become because of our parents, school, university, friends, career, and culture. Our morals were formed from our family; knowledge from our education; social discernment from friends and colleagues; and attitudes from culture. The evolution of those of us who teach, as is true for all of us, has come in large part from relationships with colleagues and students.

But Emerson invites us to think we are the essential ingredient in our growth…

When we speak to ourselves, we create narratives. If we say, “Today looks to be a bummer, I don’t feel well, my back hurts, I don’t look forward to anything,” we are likely to have an outcome reflecting those. But if we speak to ourselves looking forward to what might transpire despite not feeling particularly well, chances are we will go forth with that thought. The result might not be what we hope, but what could happen might be okay, even wonderful.

What do you think?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. ~Joan Didion

As teachers, we understand that to educate is our major responsibility. It often means focusing our efforts on ‘getting across’ information, especially when students struggle. It is necessary for building future knowledge and ideas. In the process, we may feel pressure to ‘get it done,’ to be ready to give a test or exam on time. We want our students to be ready. We don’t want them to fall behind.

But what if we step back and observe their faces?

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Marianne Williamson

Marianne Williamson’s take on fear causes us to pause. It’s not we believe we are less than what we should be, but that we don’t believe that “we are powerful beyond measure.”

Can we step back to see ourselves free to “let our light shine?”

Steve Jobs never settled on life just to live it. Two years before his death, November 2011, in a PBS documentary he said,

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life.…

So what does Jobs then say?

Martha Graham reminds us of who we are as human beings:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

Norm Donchin, a late comer to teaching, wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe under the heading “Casinos mark the failure of leadership.”

I am opposed to casino gambling.

My opposition has absolutely nothing to do with morality. It has nothing to do with the prospect of poor people throwing away their money, much as I would hate to see that happen. It doesn’t even have anything to do with the possibility of organized crime coming into the picture, much as I would hate to see that happen.

I oppose casino gambling because it represents a failure of government.

Norm went on to discuss the lack of will of politicians to raise taxes and instead have “turned to lotteries and casino gambling.” When was his letter published?

Vivian Ladd, former Museum Educator at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, in collaboration with her colleagues devised five questions for “A Closer Look,” a series of pamphlets placed at selected works of art to guide viewers to have a full experience:

What do I see?

What do I think?

How can I learn more?

What might it mean?

How do I feel about it?

What if we made these five questions central to our lives? What would happen? The short answer: They invite connection, involvement, and astonishment.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred universes that each of them see. ~Marcel Proust

A teacher’s landscape is the children who sit before them. Marcel Proust invites her to see through the eyes of each child and recognizing each’s infinite potential, possibilities of their present and future, infinite, unknown to them, unknown to her.

Her priority is to teach beyond test scores, past records, and profiles. She and her colleagues  remain wide open to discover what they may surely be missing, knowing that they do not know what their children are seeing. But they persist.

Credo from Pike's Place Fish Market:

Choose your attitude
Play
Be Present
Make someone’s day

Simple, sensible, straightforward, wise words that stop us in our tracks.

In these troubled times, when we feel drawn into a whirlpool causing chaos, we can remember to choose our attitude. We acknowledge what’s in front of us, stay calm, and do what we can to ameliorate our situation.

Here, a fish market inviting us to have a relaxed attitude, make play part of each day. To stay in the present, to surprise others, create a spontaneous celebration. The wisdom of being present that brings us back to ourselves. When we are present to ourselves and to others, it keeps us open to possibilities.

When Bankei held his seclusion–weeks of meditation, pupils from many parts of Japan came to attend. During one of these gatherings a pupil was caught stealing. The matter was reported to Bankei with the request that the culprit be expelled. Bankei ignored the case.

Later the pupil was caught in a similar act, and again Bankei ignored the matter. This angered the other pupils, who drew up a petition asking for the dismissal of the thief, stating otherwise they would leave in a body.

If you were Bankei, How would you respnd? His response…

Nasrudin was now an old man looking back on his life. He sat with his friends in the teashop telling his story.

When I was young I was fiery. I wanted to awaken everyone. I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change the world.

In midlife, I awoke one day and realized my life was half over and I had changed no one. So I prayed to Allah to give me the strength to change those close around me who so much needed it.

Alas, now I am old and my prayer is simpler. “Allah,” I ask, “please give me the strength to at least change myself.”

Imagine sitting in a café after school with Nasrudin listening to his words.

Wisdom from ancient masters endure, some in the form of a parable:

Nan-in, a Japanese Zen master from the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. “It’s overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

In our eagerness to share what we have to say, do we overfill our cup? Are we bypassing others’ minds? Are we so full of our “own opinions and speculations” that we become our own audience?

What if we are feeling, overwhelmed, subservient, out of alternatives? How would we act? Am I suggesting “as if” meaning we should pretend? Philip Pullman has something to say about this:

Theocracies demonstrate the tendency of human beings to gather power to themselves in the name of something that may not be questioned.…But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender…I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children’s stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference…We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if we were going to win.