Inspired by Students

HS #32  2018.3.6

Inspired by Students

Last month I did it again. The first time I forgot to teach a class was twenty-five years ago. Busy in my office, I looked at my watch and realized that I was fifteen minutes late. I sprinted across the hall and found the classroom empty.  Granted, the students could have come gotten me, but taking the day off seemed a better deal. That’s par.  

Last month I was similarly caught up while I was supposed to be teaching a 3:00-5:00 class at Davenport University. At 4:00 I got an email from one of the students saying he had left and would study on his own.  I raced upstairs – an hour late – expecting to find another empty classroom. Instead, everyone else was still there. One of the students had the board filled with his own impromptu math lecture  – pretty close to what I would have done. The others were dutifully taking notes.

I love surprises like that - teaching is full of them. I turn 60 this month and realize that I have spent exactly half of that time as a teacher. In one of my favorite movies, A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas Moore advises Richard Rich, “be a teacher.” A teacher is something one IS, not does.

Indeed, after mastering the material and learning techniques of pedagogy, one becomes a better teacher mostly by becoming a better person. Want proof? Who were your favorite couple of teachers? Agree?

A teacher can learn valuable teaching lessons anywhere. I am more empathetic with my students because of a summer construction job I had while in college. The gruff foreman sent me to the shed to get “6-penny nails.” Not wanting to incur his scorn by admitting ignorance, I choose a nail that looked right and brought them back. I still remember his disdain as he held them up for all to see, “Look what college boy thinks is a 6-penny nail!” I laughed (inwardly) at his derision. Just because he had been around 6-penny nails for 40 years, why did he expect me to know what they were? I keep that in mind now – sometimes telling students in mock exasperation, “Why don’t you know this algebra – I’ve been doing it for 50 years!”  The magician David Copperfield made the same point, “Any eight year old could do these tricks with twenty years of experience.”

Primarily, I have (hopefully) become a better person through interactions with students. Just this past week I had life-challenging conversations with several. One of them has two jobs, but is still finding time to read “The Stranger” by Camus and Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” – just for the enjoyment and enrichment. That inspires me.

Another gave up his sights on Stanford because he figured that he could learn just as much far less expensively close to home if he was intentional about pushing himself. Part of his plan is to seek out new experiences. I asked him what he had recently done. The previous Sunday he had visited a Catholic church for the first time. How interesting. How many conversations have I had with western Michigan folk who spend thousands of dollars to travel to foreign countries to be immersed in other cultures for a week. He is getting rich experiences in cultural immersion within his own neighborhood.

Yet another explained that their Intervarsity Christian Fellowship chapter of 60-70 students had spent the previous week’s meeting discussing, “What I like most about my race/ethnic group” as part of a series on whether it’s good to be “color blind.” How dangerous is that! We professional educators tend to keep things safe and can be threatened when not in control. Yet these students, bound together by their common faith, were willing to take the risk.

I have also been heartened by the protesting MSU students, and I got goose bumps when I heard that Hope College students seeking change from the college dropped flyers from the balcony at Vespers this past Christmas. They didn’t know it, but they were carrying the torch of some of their professors who, as Hope students in the 60’s, protested the Vietnam War by “crashing” the Tulip Time parade.  

All of these students inspire and challenge us all to become better people by seizing the day. They are living out the ideals of the Mary Oliver poem that I recently discovered: 

Tell me

what is it you plan to do 

with your one wild and precious life?