On the Boundaries of Student and Teacher

As I offer the last installment of this Tribute to Teachers: a celebration of “the sacred act of teaching,” it is obvious from the previous posts that for a variety of reasons, both personal and work-related, I’ve been reflecting lately on engagement with students in the critical enterprise of teaching and learning.

Although I’m not now directly involved in teaching, it was what drew me to a career in higher education, that kept me absorbed and challenged for over twenty years as a teacher, and that I never forgot—even when I went over to the “dark side” of academic administration.

Doing it and enabling others to do it is what I saw as my calling and, while my reach may have exceeded my grasp, it has had a profound effect on my life.

I know that the world of education and of student culture has changed, not always for the better, since my time in the classroom decades ago.  I know as well that the boundaries of personal interaction between teacher and student have tightened and, while those restrictions have emerged for important, protective reasons, they have sometimes reached uncomfortable and sometimes discouraging levels.  But I continue to believe that the kind of learning that grabs and transforms does still happen and, as I have said earlier, it happens most often when there has been an encounter with learning embodied in the relationship between teacher and student and that this is the magic that keeps us vital, that keeps us coming back.

It is serendipitous that, even as I write this, I am involved in “role reversal,” since I am enrolled in some courses—as student, not teacher—through UNC-Asheville’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. In one of those courses, entitled “The Real Socratic,” I was reading today from Chapter Two of Soren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments where he discusses the Socratic notion of teaching and learning through dialogue between the teacher and the learner (sometimes translated “disciple”).  And there I “stumbled across” Kierkegaard’s insight that “. . . the learner gives occasion for the teacher to understand himself [just as] the teacher gives occasion for the learner to understand himself.” If I had read that before in my preparation for one of the classes I was teaching decades ago, it didn’t “stick.”  Today it did and, Kierkegaard’s lack of gender consciousness aside, it undergirds my wish to “flip the focus” in this final offering on the teacher-student connection.

Out of my firm belief in this reciprocal encounter with learning, I want to share something that grew out of an experience that happened near the middle of my life as a teacher, and which shifts the “boundaries” from what teachers offer to students to what students can offer to teachers in this symbiotic relationship.

It was in 1981 and I was going through an agonizing crisis in my personal life and the life of my family.  While I sought and received the professional help available to me, on a day by day basis it was my absorption in the world of teaching and learning with the students in my classes that semester that became my anchor, my fragile hold on a sense of purpose and personal worth—the learners gave occasion for the teacher to understand himself.

So strong was that influence in my life at that critical time that it elicited from me— in an evening of self-reflection, wonder and gratitude—the only piece of poetry I ever wrote.  I called it at the time “A Teacher’s Reverie” and for whatever empathy it might elicit from the teachers who may see this—at any level of the educational world—I offer it to you as the culmination of this brief series of tributes to teachers and as an expression of that teacher-student relationship that, in Parker Palmer’s words, “tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart.”

They come up, year after year,
            Out of the gates of morning.

Can they know what I feel?

            Can spring that has never seen autumn
                        know how winter feels when it is born again?
            Does the new leaf sense fresh life
                        in the tree that has trembled naked in the wind?
            Might the dancing flame understand the tallow tears
                        that course down the candle it has warmed once more?
            Are the spectral hues on pallet and brush
                       aware of their caress on a faded canvas?
            Does the gentle summer rain share the quenching
                        of the dry and thirsty ground that swallows up its moisture?

How can they know that wounds they cannot see
                      they have helped to heal?

            Can youth borrow age
                      as age has borrowed youth?
            If it cannot, I am the happiest of thieves.
            If it can, I shall owe a mere hundredfold
                      more than I can pay.

(Published in the 1981 edition of Mars Hill College’s literary journal, The Cadenza, and twenty-five years later, in 2006, as the lyrics for a choral piece commissioned for and performed by the Mars Hill College Choir under the direction of Joel Reed, composed by Dan Locklair, and published by Subito Music Publishing  under the title “The Gates of Morning.”)