It takes some time as an educator to learn how to not care whether your students respect you. Of course, I prefer it if my students enjoy our time together and get something of value out of it. But I make no attempt to get them to admire me or follow me as the holder of some authority or any of that.
When I began as a teacher, explicitly and implicitly, I wanted my students to be impressed enough to follow me into the world of ideas. A stroke of my ego was what I was after. I would blow the horn of intellect and then expect them to make a little music in the key of me.
In practice, this meant process over people and my being a hard ass. Tough grades. A clear path to goals. Obvious irritation on my part in response to the inevitable misbehavior on theirs.
What? You do not respect me enough to comply? Just look at the sophistication of my syllabus. Surely you should admire it and its author.
Life is never so blunt as in its humbling of us. With a pot belly, a bald head, and the novels I presumed I would write still unfinished, it would be harder to ride the ego of my youth. Besides, in countless small moments in the classroom and a few terrible ones out of it, I learned the chief lesson of Western Literature, one captured by a character in Flannery O’Connor who says: “You aren’t who you think you are.”
While I accept that some teachers must, and maybe should, model compliance, structure, and achievement as a way to motivate, lead and serve those in their charge, I care only for experimentation and creativity. Skills? Tools? Your resume? I do not doubt they matter. But I also don’t much care about any of them either.
With the world falling off several cliffs at once, I want to make sure that at the very least we as a class, or I as a teacher, make a different mistake and put people—the kids—over any process.
Hierarchy? Authority? Position? Let’s play for a few years in the kindergarten of words and literature and then come back and see where we are. Let’s unstrap ourselves from the rocket ship of technology until we know its destination. Let’s write something soft or gentle or hard or angled. Let’s make the words essential if only because the paper they are written on can be folded into a paper airplane and flown in the direction of the recycling bin.
Let’s say, with Wallace Stevens, that “being here together is enough” and then, on top of that, do one thing out of love.