Why Teach?

Yesterday, I went into work an hour early to tutor two high school special needs students.  The one had a question every once in a while but worked primarily on his own.  The other—we’ll call him Jerry—had filled out a writing web with 11 details about why it is good to be in the “community” group rather than the “compliance” group at the boys’ home where I work.  The details were wonderful, and showed a level of maturity and sophistication you would not expect from a ninth-grade student who functions academically between a first and second grade level, in that all the details were oriented towards the opportunity to serve, learn and grow rather than the self-centered perks that come along with being in the community.  I thought cool, until I turned to his rough draft.  Instead of being about the opportunities that come with being in the community, it was about food—what is delicious and what is not. 

Damn, not again, I thought.  So far, for Jerry, there is no sequence, no connectivity, as you and I understand it, where one thought is linked to another, and details attach to a main idea.  Sure, it’s there somewhere, or that web wouldn’t have demonstrated such sophistication, but it’s not triggered the same as it is for you and I.  Therefore, I spent the next 45 minutes explaining how the web is where you brainstorm your ideas for your rough draft, that they should have something to do with each other, that although they may be apples and oranges, they are not apples and Orangutans, and all the while, he’s interrupting me in a low-level panic, “So, Mr. Steve, this is not right?” and I’m fighting frustration at his focus being on right or wrong.

“Jerry,” don’t worry about that.    Just listen.”

“I can fix, Mr. Steve.  I am a good boy.”

Yes, Jerry.  But you need to relax, slow down, listen.  You have great stuff here—both of these are good—but they don’t connect.  They don’t match.  One is a red sock, one a blue…”

At that moment, I decide, I can’t make him redo the assignment.  It will crush him.  He put his best into both.  He just didn’t grasp one thing leads to another.  Or he did, at the most important level; at the being-human level, he grasped something a lot of CEO’s don’t grasp—that the purpose of life is to serve others and enjoy good food along the way.  But, at the academic level, that whole notion of line upon line, precept upon precept was and usually is lost on Jerry.  I knew I also had to give him his task fast.  Jerry doesn’t like to wait.  He wants to work, to show he’s learning, which to him means doing—something we definitely don’t agree on, but if I can’t get across A should connect to B right now, I’m probably not going to convey the idea that more can be learned in a moment of complete stillness than in a lifetime of doing. 

So, I decide to have him write the rough draft that should go with his web on the community and the web that should go with his rough draft on delicious foods.  Will that get through to him that a web and a rough draft go together?  I won’t know until he turns it in.  Knowing Jerry, I might get something about the joys of sitting on a soft couch as his essay to go with the web on the community, and a web on different facts about China to go with his essay on delicious food.

I would go crazy if I taught only to have success.  Sure, success needs to happen too, or I should find another profession.  But to try to control all the variables that makes up a child’s future, or equally asinine, to try and ignore all those variables—genetics, family, community—is absurd.

This is a dangerous thing to say in education these days, but here it is anyways:  I teach because it blows my mind that Jerry, a ninth grader who operates at a second grade level, knows something most CEO’s don’t—that the purpose of life is to serve others and enjoy delicious food along the way.  And neither Jerry, nor the CEO knows this.  It’s my little secret (at least until now).  I get how profoundly important Jerry is to the human web and others don’t.  He isn’t a burden on society.  He is the jewel, the reason society exists.  Not just Jerry.  Not because he’s “special.”  Just because he is.  All of us, just because we are.

That’s it; that’s why I teach: to participate in children’s lives.  What could be greater than going into work an hour early to hear Jerry say, “Good Morning, Mr. Steve”?—his big jolly body announcing life is good, his big smile screaming it, just in case you don’t get that. 

Of course every teacher knows—especially middle school teachers—you’re more likely to walk down to your classroom and find one or two students sitting on the floor outside, headphones on, hunched over, hair in their eyes, wilted in doom.  And that’s great too.  Perhaps that’s why I love to teach.  Children have an honesty, and integrity about them, that somehow gets lost in most of the adult world.  Sure, sometimes it’s a bit overdramatic.  Doom?  Really?  You probably didn’t even have to make your own bed this morning.  But I prefer that to the make believe adult world where everyone is making progress, where everyone is changing the world around them for the better, this great and glorious march up the ladder towards perfection.

Teaching, if done right, is a profession where every morning you get to go into work and just be.  Kids are open.   They want to experience life outside what they learned at home.  They are hungry for the new.  Because the other teacher in our building is a permaculturist and environmentalist, our students are into all things organic.  Overall, we’re not supposed to play music with lyrics, so I play Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, but also Henry Mancini and Scott Joplin.   I even felt brazen enough to play John Denver (lyrics and all!) and they love it.  They’re always asking, “Who is this, Mr. Steve?”  We even spent twenty or so minutes watching this dude’s joy—and I simply said, “damn, you know you’ve found the right career when it makes you feel like this!”  That was my lesson.  What else could be said?

 

Really, the only reason not to teach is if you are out to rescue lives.  Sure, there may be a few gifted teachers who can carry on that intense passion you see in the movies, who will never give up on a child, who will see them through, who will be successful again and again.  On average there are two of them for every fifty other mere mortals.   The other 48 burn out trying to be that super teacher—and nothing is more dangerous to children than adults who no longer believe and yet act as if they do.   Kids have built in hypocrisy radars, bullshit detectors.  If you need to change a child’s life to bolster your ego, quit.  Become a gardener or a carpenter—something where you have a little more control over the variables.  But if you just want to be—there is a classroom of kids waiting for your example.  Because that is simply something you can’t know at such a young age.  The minute you find clothes you’re comfortable in, you’ve outgrown them.   Being doesn’t come easy, which is what a child needs most—lots of adults who are comfortable in their own skin.  That is the safety they seek.  I exist, I am, and that’s alright.   I am not a freak of nature after all.  Teaching the quadratic equation or how to diagram a complex sentence is only a vehicle to do that—a detractor from the self long enough the self can be found. 

The poet Sam Green, a great teacher of mine, once shared this with me:

My grandfather would take me out fishing, and we’d be out there in his small boat drifting, and he’d say something like, “see that rock over there,” and I’d look, and there’d be something like a moose or a bear, and I’d say, “Grandpa!  Look, a bear!”

He’d say, “Wow!” 

It wasn’t until much later I realized what he was doing.  Now that is teaching.