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The Teaching Continuum

This year, I will be entering my ninth year as a teacher. I have posted in the past about some of my experiences, but I take this time to do so again because it is such a unique, enduring, significant, challenging, and fulfilling part of my life.

I have felt that no teacher remains a teacher without being taught in some way by his students. This is true for me, and I suppose that the most important lessons I have learned relate to the effects that my students and my experiences as a teacher have had on me. It fascinated me to believe that I would not be the person I am without the changes I've experienced as a teacher. I learned, for instance, that force is a poor motivator and a quick way to isolate yourself; and that respect as a leader comes less from charisma as it does from fairness. On this latter point, I have learned that you can have fairness with charisma and be loved, but cannot have charisma sans fairness and last. Indeed, I have wasted time mourning my lack of gusto with students, and in comparing myself to teachers who are very different people than me, when I was learning all the while one of the most important lessons of teaching: that students fundamentally need to feel safe in a classroom. Equally important, I did not see that passion--the soul of charisma-- can take subtle forms, not least of which in a classroom is a simple love of learning.

Unexpectedly, I also learned that my role as a teacher would change my relations with those outside the classroom. As I practiced establishing boundaries with students, I learned-- sometimes by stepping lightly, and other times by making mad leaps-- that making your needs and wants clear to others is a good thing. On seeing the success of such communication with students, I began to apply the same understanding to acquaintances, friends, and family; and while the result has not always been pleasant, and has at times led to a regression, I do not go too far when I say that my identity was planted in firmer soil. I became more like myself. Of course, this happened in the transition from my twenties to my thirties, and one could argue that such discoveries about oneself are natural. I would respond that-- like other objects in the universe-- humans do not move without being pushed.

Ghosts remained, however, for I learned in time that one can create artificial barriers between oneself and others by focusing on performance. Indeed, I focused early in my career on the knowledge I could give to my students. I gradually discovered that the better path to learning is to do so with my students. Put simply, I found more joy and passion in allowing students to see me as a learner alongside them, rather than as a source of static, limited, and scripted information. I learned vulnerability, of a sort, by allowing them to see my confusions as well as my knowledge. As with my relatively new knowledge of communication cited above, such openness naturally led to new understandings with others in my life. I learned that being genuine leads to trust, and in turn that trust is a foundation for the connections we are meant to share with others.

Theologian Lewis Smedes once wrote, "My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed--and each of the five has been me."* I feel as though this has been my experience as a teacher and, subsequently, as a person. Teachers and teaching cannot be static, because living is not static. We change because our circumstances and experiences change us. This is good. It allows us to harness all the knowledge of years and experience for our own and others' good.

Of course, the danger for a teacher, like any person in authority, is that he can choose not to use it for the students' good. At the end of a school year, I sometimes write in students' yearbooks to "use your power for good, and not for evil." It's meant to be funny, but it's also in part to show them that they have the ability to live with others in mind, and to use whatever gifts they have been given to benefit those around them. I think the same lesson could be applied to the teacher, the parent, the doctor, the garbage man, the baker, tree trimmer, and custodian. We have power, and we have choice. Since the former lessons I mentioned above mean nothing without our decision to use them in a positive way, I believe that this lesson is the most far-reaching of them all. It reminds us that we have purpose, and invites us to live out that purpose with an urgency and vibrance that--if applied--will both inspire and change. Indeed, few gifts in life are greater than to choose to spend your energy for the benefit of others. "If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed," says God in Isaiah 58:10, "then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday." Love is the secret. If we share it with our lives, we change the world.**

*I obtained this quote from a sermon by Pastor Tim Keller.
**I believe that knowing God through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross allows us to emulate him and so love more fully than we could otherwise love. I suppose I am just giving credit where credit is due. :-)

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