A Teaching Life

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.

I have thought a lot about how we choose our paths in life. Some say we are predestined, others say it’s by chance, and still others say we are called. I fall into the last category. Perhaps it’s hindsight, but other than briefly considering the ministry becoming a teacher was always there.

“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path,” writes James Hillman.  “You may remember this ‘something’ as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a particular turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am…

Robert Kegan writes in his seminal book, The Evolving Self,

The greatest inequalities in education are not between schools…but within them; greater than the inequalities of social class or achievement test scores is the unequal capacity of students to interest others in them––a phenomenon not reducible to social class or intelligence, and which seems to be the more powerful determinant of future thriving.

Teachers can recall students who seemed to have been hiding from them, those who have “the unequal capacity…to interest others in them?” They may well remember in the first days of school that they discovered a student she hadn’t ‘seen.’ He slipped through the cracks.…

Carol Dweck, a respected educator, writes, “for twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.”

She contrasts two mindsets people can have:

The first, “believing that your qualities are carved in stone––the fixed mindset––creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over… There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt with and have to live with…This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.”

Wisdom can come from anywhere. We often think that it takes years. Yet, we can be surprised. Molly Ness, a first-year teacher offered her wisdom seemingly well beyond her years.

I have learned that children are unbelievably resilient. My students have been handed immeasurable challenges and have tackled them with the courage, grace, and strength that many adults fail to demonstrate.

I have learned how to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.

I have learned that it is easy to be idealistic in thoughts and words, but much harder to keep that idealism alive in actions every day.

I have realized that not enough people in our society today devote their lives, their energies, and their souls to making this world a little better than they found it.

And…

In the mid-nineties, at Central Park East Secondary School, Debbie Meier and her faculty developed five habits of mind that became the heart of their curriculum across the school and the basis for judging student performance; they were posted in classrooms.

• Questions about evidence, or “How do we know what we know?”
• The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or “Who is speaking?”
• The search for connections and patterns, or “What causes what?”
• Supposition, or “How might things have been different?”
• Why any of it matters, or “Who cares?”

What if these five habits of mind were posted in every classroom in every school across the country? What if…

When Benjamin Zander was teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music, his students insisted on playing perfectly whenever he was present. He became frustrated with their dog-and-pony shows, which they were doing in order to get their A. Zander wanted to breakdown this grade barrier and become free to teach.

He missed being their teacher, because his grading system focused on performance, his students played perfectly whenever he was present. He decided to ask them to write a letter to him in the past tense dated at the end of the term to explain how they earned their A.

Twenty-five years ago, teacher Suzanne Rubinstein wrote an insightful look at the life of her students. "These days, too many of my students come to me without the stability symbolized by the family dinner. Was it different 10 years ago? I think it was.…They came into my classroom better able to concentrate on the practical learning tasks, their minds free of the weight that loneliness and insecurity impose. She continues…

Haim Ginott, a teacher and writer, wrote, “I have come to a frightening conclusion I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.”

Anyone who’s been a teacher or one in charge of children at any age, understands this. Regardless of expectations from authorities and supervisors, when a teacher closes her door it is her domain. In Ginott’s words, she can say to herself. I possesses “tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.”