At my core I am a servant. As a servant I have embraced a number of roles during my adult life. The first role I embraced was that of a classroom teacher. Two days ago I began to reflect upon my role as a classroom teacher. As I reflected I began to recall moments in the classroom when I could hardly hold the joy. When I and my students discovered new territory and then together explored it. When a pathway out of the dark forest opened before us – or we cut our own pathway out and we moved into the light of learning together. At those times teaching and learning were the most rewarding endeavors I knew.
AND, remember, there is always an ‘AND,’ then there were the other moments. Those moments – or minutes or even, it seemed, hours – where the environment was life-less or pain-filled or chaos-filled. I felt so power-less, so impotent, so fraudulent, as a teacher, that I experienced myself as a transparent sham. It seemed that I and my students were from alien planets and that the subject I thought I knew so well I didn’t seem to have even a tiny grasp of. I thought ‘What a fool I am for thinking that I could be a teacher!’ Teaching had become more difficult for me than reading Chinese (and I could not read Chinese at all).
The challenges of teaching are fed by three powerful tap roots. The first two tap roots are well known, the third not-so-much. The third, I believe, is the most fundamental. The first tap root is the subject we teach. Even though we immerse ourselves in our subject there is always more we can – and should – learn. We become experts and we are at the same time seeking to learn more. The second tap root is the students we are entrusted with. They, as we know, are complex (talk about an understatement). In order for us to see them clearly, to see them as whole human beings and to discern and respond to the ways they learn requires that we infuse both the Wisdom of Solomon and the method of Socrates.
Now if these were the only two tap roots needed our standard ways of teaching and coping would suffice. We could keep up by learning and integrating more of our subject matter and more techniques and keep two steps ahead of our students. We could learn enough to cope with and keep ahead of the development of the student psyche. But there is a third tap root; the most crucial tap root. The tap root that answers the question: ‘What do we Teach?’
We Teach WHO We Are! Teaching, like all human activities, is rooted in who we are – for better or for worse. When I teach I project who I am onto my students. Who I am directly influences what and how I teach and directly affects how I perceive and engage each of my students. Who I am, my character if you will, is revealed as I teach – this revelation is even more transparent when I am feeling high stress, high anxiety, high frustration, and when I am feeling inadequate.
The Oracle’s counsel is crucial: Know thy self! Socrates was correct: The unexamined life is not worth living! Greenleaf upped the ante: To refuse to examine the assumptions one lives by is immoral!
I continue to hold three essential life questions (actually I hold more than these three): Who am I? Who am I choosing to become? Why am I choosing this becoming?
Gentle Reader, what are three essential life questions that you hold?
Searcher-Seeker 