The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life:
Introduction
Teaching from Within
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, “[Ah, not to be cut off]”1
==
We Teach Who We Are
I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly
hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore,
when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illu-
mined by the lightning-life of the mind—then teaching is the finest work I know.
But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused—and I
am so powerless to do anything about it—that my claim to be a teacher seems a
transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some
alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that
keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool I was to imagine that I had mas-
tered this occult art—harder to divine than tea leaves and impossible for mortals
to do even passably well!
If you are a teacher who never has bad days, or who has them but does not care,
this book is not for you. This book is for teachers who have good days and bad,
and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one
loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts because they love learn-
ers, learning, and the teaching life.
When you love your work that much—and many teachers do—the only way to get
out of trouble is to go deeper in. We must enter, not evade, the tangles of teaching
so we can understand them better and negotiate them with more grace, not only
to guard our own spirits but also to serve our students well.
Those tangles have three important sources. The first two are commonplace, but
the third, and most fundamental, is rarely given its due. First, the subjects we
teach are as large and complex as life, so our knowledge of them is always flawed
and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching
requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the stu-
dents we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly
and see them whole, and respond to them wisely in the moment, requires a fusion
of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve.
If students and subjects accounted for all the complexities of teaching, our stan-
dard ways of coping would do—keep up with our fields as best we can and learn
enough techniques to stay ahead of the student psyche. But there is another rea-
son for these complexities: we teach who we are.
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Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better
or worse. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my sub-
ject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the class-
room are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed
from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that
mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge—and
knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my
subject.
In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self-knowledge.
When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them
through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life—and when I cannot
see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot
know my subject—not at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning. I will
know it only abstractly, from a distance, a congeries of concepts as far removed
from the world as I am from personal truth.
The work required to “know thyself” is neither selfish nor narcissistic. Whatever
self-knowledge we attain as teachers will serve our students and our scholarship
well. Good teaching requires self-knowledge: it is a secret hidden in plain sight.
===
Landscapes Inner and Outer
This book explores the teacher's inner life, but it also raises a question that goes
beyond the solitude of the teacher's soul: How can the teacher's selfhood become
a legitimate topic in education and in our public dialogues on educational reform?
Teaching and learning are critical to our individual and collective survival and to
the quality of our lives. The pace of change has us snarled in complexities, confu-
sions, and conflicts that will diminish us, or do us in, if we do not enlarge our
capacity to teach and to learn. At the same time, teacher-bashing has become a
popular sport. Panic-stricken by the demands of our day, we need scapegoats for
the problems we cannot solve and the sins we cannot bear.
Teachers make an easy target, for they are such a common species and so power-
less to strike back. We blame teachers for being unable to cure social ills that no
one knows how to treat; we insist that they instantly adopt whatever “solution”
has most recently been concocted by our national panacea machine; and in the
process, we demoralize, even paralyze, the very teachers who could help us find
our way.
In our rush to reform education, we have forgotten a simple truth: reform will
never be achieved by renewing appropriations, restructuring schools, rewriting
curricula, and revising texts if we continue to demean and dishearten the human
resource called the teacher on whom so much depends. Teachers must be better
compensated, freed from bureaucratic harassment, given a role in academic
governance, and provided with the best possible methods and materials. But none
of that will transform education if we fail to cherish—and challenge—the human
heart that is the source of good teaching.
We are now engaged in a crucial public conversation about educational reform,
but a conversation is only as good as the questions it entertains. This book raises
a question about teaching that goes unasked in our national dialogue—and often
goes unasked even in the places where teachers are educated and employed. But it
should be asked wherever good teaching is at stake, for it honors and challenges
the teacher's heart, and it invites a deeper inquiry than our traditional questions
do:
•The question we most commonly ask is the “what” question—what
subjects shall we teach?
•When the conversation goes a bit deeper, we ask the “how” ques-
tion—what methods and techniques are required to teach well?
•Occasionally, when it goes deeper still, we ask the “why” question—
for what purpose and to what ends do we teach?
•But seldom, if ever, do we ask the “who” question—who is the self
that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form—or de-
form—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my
world? How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the self-
hood from which good teaching comes?
I have no quarrel with the what or how or why questions—except when they are
posed as the only questions worth asking. All of them can yield important insights
into teaching and learning. But none of them opens up the territory I want to ex-
plore in this book: the inner landscape of the teaching self.
To chart that landscape fully, three important paths must be taken—intellectual,
emotional, and spiritual—and none can be ignored. Reduce teaching to intellect,
and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions, and it becomes narcis-
sistic; reduce it to the spiritual, and it loses its anchor to the world. Intellect, emo-
tion, and spirit depend on one another for wholeness. They are interwoven in the
human self and in education at its best, and I have tried to interweave them in this
book as well.
By intellectual I mean the way we think about teaching and learning—the form and
content of our concepts of how people know and learn, of the nature of our stu-
dents and our subjects. By emotional I mean the way we and our students feel as
we teach and learn—feelings that can either enlarge or diminish the exchange be-
tween us. By spiritual I mean the diverse ways we answer the heart's longing to be
connected with the largeness of life—a longing that animates love and work, espe-
cially the work called teaching.
Rainer Maria Rilke gives voice to that longing in the poem at the head of this intro-
duction: “Ah, not to be cut off ...” He suggests that the spiritual quest for connect-
edness, rightly understood, will lead us out from the hidden heart into the vast
and visible world: “The inner—what is it?/if not intensified sky,/hurled through
with birds and deep/with the winds of homecoming.”
With striking imagery, Rilke offers us a mystic's map of wholeness, where inner
and outer reality flow seamlessly into each other, like the ever-merging surfaces of
a Möbius strip, endlessly co-creating us and the world we inhabit. Though this
book is grounded in the teacher's inner terrain, it constantly segues into the outer
forms of community that teaching and learning require. The inward quest for
communion becomes a quest for outward relationship: at home in our own souls,
we become more at home with each other.
My concern for the inner landscape of teaching may seem indulgent, even irrel-
evant, at a time when many teachers are struggling simply to survive. Wouldn't it
be more practical, I am sometimes asked, to offer tips, tricks, and techniques for
staying alive in the classroom, things that ordinary teachers can use in everyday
life?
The question puzzles me, because for thirty years I have made practical use of the
approach taken in this book, leading workshops and retreats for educators of all
sorts. I have worked with countless teachers, and many of them have confirmed
my own experience: as important as methods may be, the most practical thing we
can achieve in any kind of work is insight into what is happening inside us as we
do it. The more familiar we are with our inner terrain, the more surefooted our
teaching—and living—becomes.
I have heard that in the training of therapists, which involves much practical tech-
nique, there is this saying: “Technique is what you use until the therapist arrives.”
Good methods can help a therapist find a way into the client's dilemma, but good
therapy does not begin until the real-life therapist joins with the real life of the
client.
Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives, and this book is
about helping that teacher show up. Yet even if it is true that inner work has prac-
tical outcomes for individuals, the question of practicality arises in another form:
How can educational institutions support the teacher's inner life, and should they
be expected to do so?
That question is worthy of a thoughtful answer, so Chapter VI is devoted to it. For
the moment, I will turn the question around: How can schools educate students if
they fail to support the teacher's inner life? To educate is to guide students on an
inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world. How
can schools perform their mission without encouraging the guides to scout out that inner terrain?
===
that inner terrain?
===
Note
1. Stephen Mitchell (ed.), “Ah, Not to Be Cut Off,” in Ahead of All Parting: The
Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Modern Library,
1995), p. 191.
===
Chapter I
The Heart of a Teacher
Identity and Integrity in Teaching
Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces ...
—May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”1
===
Teaching Beyond Technique
Not long before I started this book, as summer took a slow turn toward fall, I
walked into a college classroom and into my third decade of teaching.
I went to class that day grateful for another chance to teach; teaching engages my
soul as much as any work I know. But I came home that evening convinced once
again that I will never master this baffling vocation. Annoyed with some of my stu-
dents and embarrassed by my own blunders, I pondered a recurring question:
Might it be possible, at my age, to find a new line of work, maybe even something
I know how to do?
The students in my first section were silent as monks. Despite my shameless
pleading, I could not buy a response from them, and I soon found myself sinking
into one of my oldest phobias: I must be very boring to anesthetize, so quickly,
these young people who only moments earlier had been alive with hallway chatter.
In the second section they talked, but the talk flared into conflict as one student
insisted that the concerns of another student were “petty” and did not deserve
attention. I masked my irritation and urged open listening to diverse views, but the
air was already polluted, and the dialogue died. That, of course, sank me into an-
other ancient angst: how awkward I am at dealing with conflict when my students
decide to start talking!
I have taught thousands of students, attended many seminars on teaching,
watched others teach, read about teaching, and reflected on my own experience.
My stockpile of methods is substantial. But when I walk into a new class, it is as if
I am starting over. My problems are perennial, familiar to all teachers. Still, they
take me by surprise, and my responses to them—though outwardly smoother
with each year—feel almost as fumbling as they did when I was a novice.
After three decades of trying to learn my craft, every class comes down to this: my
students and I, face to face, engaged in an ancient and exacting exchange called
education. The techniques I have mastered do not disappear, but neither do they
suffice. Face to face with my students, only one resource is at my immediate com-
mand: my identity, my selfhood, my sense of this “I” who teaches—without which
I have no sense of the “Thou” who learns.
This book builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to
technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
The premise is simple, but its implications are not. It will take time to unfold what
I do and do not mean by those words. But here is one way to put it: in every class I
teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the sub-
ject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and
trust my selfhood—and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the ser-
vice of learning.
My evidence for this claim comes, in part, from years of asking students to tell me
about their good teachers. Listening to those stories, it becomes impossible to
claim that all good teachers use similar techniques: some lecture nonstop and
others speak very little; some stay close to their material and others loose the
imagination; some teach with the carrot and others with the stick.
But in every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of
personal identity infuses their work. “Dr. A is really there when she teaches,” a stu-
dent tells me, or “Mr. B has such enthusiasm for his subject,” or “You can tell that
this is really Prof. C's life.”
One student I heard about said she could not describe her good teachers because
they differed so greatly, one from another. But she could describe her bad teach-
ers because they were all the same: “Their words float somewhere in front of their
faces, like the balloon speech in cartoons.”
With one remarkable image she said it all. Bad teachers distance themselves from
the subject they are teaching—and in the process, from their students. Good
teachers join self and subject and students in the fabric of life.
Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a
complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students
so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. The methods used by
these weavers vary widely: lectures, Socratic dialogues, laboratory experiments,
collaborative problem solving, creative chaos. The connections made by good
teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts—meaning heart in its an-
cient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge
in the human self.
As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the
heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension is held, the shuttle
flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the
heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart—and the more one loves teaching,
the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep
one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more
than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fab-
ric of community that learning, and living, require.
If teaching cannot be reduced to technique, it is both good news and bad. The
good news is that we no longer need suffer the boredom many of us feel when
teaching is approached as a question of “how to do it.” We rarely talk with each
other about teaching at any depth—and why should we when we have nothing
more than “tips, tricks, and techniques” to discuss? That kind of talk fails to touch
the heart of a teacher's experience.
The good news gets even better. If teaching cannot be reduced to technique, I no
longer need suffer the pain of having my peculiar gift as a teacher crammed into
the Procrustean bed of someone else's method and the standards prescribed by
it. That pain is felt throughout education today as we glorify the method du jour,
leaving people who teach differently feeling devalued, forcing them to measure up
to norms not their own.
I will never forget one professor who, moments before I was to start a workshop
on teaching, unloaded years of pent-up workshop animus on me: “I am an organic
chemist. Are you going to spend the next two days telling me that I am supposed
to teach organic chemistry through role playing?” We must find an approach to
teaching that respects the diversity of teachers and subjects, which method-
ological reductionism fails to do.
The good news is very good, but the bad news is daunting. If identity and integrity
are more fundamental to good teaching than technique—and if we want to grow
as teachers—we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to
each other about our inner lives—risky stuff in a profession that fears the per-
sonal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.
I was reminded of that fear recently as I listened to a group of faculty argue about
what to do when students share personal experiences in class—experiences that
are related to the themes of the course but that some professors regard as “more
suited to a therapy session than to a college classroom.”
The house soon divided along predictable lines. On one side were the scholars,
insisting that the subject is primary and must never be compromised for the sake
of the students' lives. On the other side were the student-centered folks, insisting
that the lives of students must always come first even if it means that the subject
gets shortchanged. The more vigorously these camps promoted their polarized
ideas, the more antagonistic they became—and the less they learned about peda-
gogy or about themselves.
The gap between these views seems unbridgeable—until we understand what cre-
ates it. At bottom, these professors were not debating teaching techniques. They
were revealing the diversity of identity and integrity among themselves, saying, in
various ways, “Here are my own limits and potentials when it comes to dealing
with the relation between the subject and my students' lives.”
If we stopped lobbing pedagogical points at each other and spoke about who we
are as teachers, a remarkable thing might happen: identity and integrity might
grow within us and among us, instead of hardening as they do when we defend
our fixed positions from the foxholes of the pedagogy wars.
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surrounds us. Now we must remind ourselves that inner reality can give us lever-
age in the realm of objects and events.
We will find such a reminder in the testimony of Václav Havel, poet and man of
practical affairs, a leader in the Velvet Revolution that liberated Czechoslovakia
from Soviet rule. It was a revolution that succeeded in the face of obstacles con-
siderably more daunting than those stacked against educational reform.
Havel, who served as the first president of the Czech Republic, writes about
spending years “under a rock” of institutional oppression that was dropped on the
Czech people in the Communist coup of 1968. Then he speaks of the inward seed
of human consciousness and how it grew into a flower of reform that cracked and
crumbled the granite of totalitarianism a mere twenty years later: “The ... expe-
rience I'm talking about has given me one certainty: ... the salvation of this human
world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect,
in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in ...
human consciousness, nothing will change for the better, and the catastrophe to-
ward which this world is headed ... will be unavoidable.”4
Havel helped the Czech people reclaim their hearts by reminding them who they,
and all of us, are: not victims of external forces but persons possessed of an inner
power that cannot be taken from us, though we can and do give it away.
Remembering ourselves and our power can lead to revolution, but it requires
more than recalling a few facts. Re-membering involves putting ourselves back to-
gether, recovering identity and integrity, reclaiming the wholeness of our lives.
When we forget who we are we do not merely drop some data. We dis-member
ourselves, with unhappy consequences for our politics, our work, our hearts.
Academics often suffer the pain of dismemberment. On the surface, this is the
pain of people who thought they were joining a community of scholars but find
themselves in distant, competitive, and uncaring relationships with colleagues
and students. Deeper down, this pain is more spiritual than sociological: it comes
from being disconnected from our own truth, from the passions that took us into
teaching, from the heart that is the source of all good work.
If we have lost the heart to teach, how can we take heart again? How can we re-
member who we are, for our own sake and the sake of those we serve?
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Mentors Who Evoked Us
If identity and integrity are found at the intersection of the forces that converge in
our lives, revisiting some of the convergences that called us toward teaching may
allow us to reclaim the selfhood from which good teaching comes. In this section
and the next, I want to reflect on two such encounters—with the mentors who
evoked us and with the subjects of study that chose us.
The power of our mentors is not necessarily in the models of good teaching they
gave us, models that may turn out to have little to do with who we are as teachers.
Their power is in their capacity to awaken a truth within us, a truth we can reclaim
years later by recalling their impact on our lives. If we discovered a teacher's heart
in ourselves by meeting a great teacher, recalling that meeting may help us take
heart in teaching once more.
In faculty workshops, I often ask people to introduce themselves by talking about
a teacher who made a difference in their lives. As these stories are told, we are re-
minded of many facts about good teaching: that it comes in many forms, that the
imprint of good teachers remains long after the facts they gave us have faded, and
that it is important to thank our mentors, no matter how belatedly—partly because
we owe them gratitude and partly as a cosmic counterpoint to the apparent ingrat-
itude of our own students!
Then I ask the question that opens to the deeper purpose of this exercise: not
“What made your mentor great?” but “What was it about you that allowed great
mentoring to happen?” Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting
the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student. In this encounter, not
only are the qualities of the mentor revealed, but the qualities of the student are
drawn out in a way that is equally revealing.
One of my most memorable mentors was a man who seemed to break every
“rule” of good teaching. He lectured at such length, and with such enthusiasm,
that he left little room for questions and comments. Preoccupied with the world of
thought, he listened poorly to students, not because he disdained them but be-
cause he was so eager to teach them by the only way he knew—sharing his knowl-
edge and passions. His classes were mostly monologues, and his students rarely
played any role other than audience.
He may sound like a pedagogical nightmare, but for reasons I could not articulate
at the time, I was powerfully drawn to his teaching—indeed, he changed my life.
Only years later did I understand my attraction and in that understanding are
some clues to my identity.
I was the first in my family to attend college. My family valued education, but it of-
fered no exemplars of the intellectual life that has turned out to be my birthright
gift. I kept that gift sealed in the box it came in all the way through high school,
graduating somewhere below the median of my class, with a major in extracur-
ricular activities. Not until the second semester of college did I open the box, get
excited about what was in it, and start doing well at schoolwork, going on to grad-
uate school and into an academic career.
My loquacious professor in college gave me a first glimpse into this part of my-
self. My excitement in listening to him lay less in what he said—though his ideas
were exhilarating—than in discovering a dormant dimension of my identity. It did
not matter to me that he violated most rules of good group process and even
some rules of considerate personal relations. What mattered was that he gener-
ously opened the life of his mind to me, giving full voice to the gift of thought.
Something in me knew that this gift was mine as well, though it was years before I
could fully trust that knowledge.
Long into my career I harbored a secret sense that thinking and reading and writ-
ing, as much as I loved them, did not qualify as “real work.” I taught and wrote,
but I “justified” myself by working as an administrator for various institutions and
projects—work that was practical and thus worthy, like that done by honored
members of my family. Only in my mid-forties was I finally able to claim the life of
the mind as the mainstay of my vocation, to trust the calling of my soul, a trust
that deepened when I was able to decode this early experience of being mentored.
As we recall our mentors, not all of our self-insights are as happy as the one I have
just drawn. We sometimes take the wrong lessons from the mentors who draw us
when we are young and impressionable.
I witnessed such a case at a faculty workshop I led a few years ago. My on-campus
host had taken pains to warn me about Professor X, a curmudgeonly and unpop-
ular teacher, though brilliant in his scholarly field. Of the forty people in the work-
shop, my host said, Professor X had probably signed up not to learn about teach-
ing but to debunk what we were doing.
In trepidation, I began the workshop with something “soft,” inviting people to
introduce themselves by talking about their mentors. By the time we got to Pro-
fessor X, six or eight people had spoken, many with insight and feeling, and a spir-
it of openness filled the room. I tensed as he began to speak, fearing that this spir-
it was about to be killed. But it soon became clear that he, too, had been touched
by the quality of the exchange.
He told the story of his mentor with the hesitancy that comes from speaking of sa-
cred things and—as he talked about how hard he had tried to model his own ca-
reer after his mentor's—he surprised us, and surely himself, by choking up.
Later, in private conversation with him, I learned the reason for his emotions. For
twenty years, Professor X had tried to imitate his mentor's way of teaching and
being, and it had been a disaster. He and his mentor were very different people,
and X's attempt to clone his mentor's style had distorted his own identity and in-
tegrity. He had lost himself in an identity not his own—a painful insight that took
courage to embrace, but one with the promise of growth.
Professor X's story gave me some insight into myself, an example of the mutual
illumination that often occurs when we are willing to explore our inner dynamics
with each other. Early in my career, I, too, had tried to emulate my mentor with
nonstop lecturing, until I realized that my students were even less enthralled by
my cheap imitation than some of my classmates had been by the genuine original.
I began to look for a way to teach that was more integral to my own nature, a way
that would have as much integrity for me as my mentor's had for him—for the key
to my mentor's power was the coherence between his method and himself. I
began the long process of trying to understand my own nature as a teacher and to
learn the techniques that might help it along.
Though I need sometimes to lecture and may even enjoy doing it, lecturing all the
time simply bores me: I usually know what I am going to say, and I have heard it
all before. But dialogical methods of teaching help keep me alive. Forced to listen,
respond, and improvise, I am more likely to hear something unexpected and in-
sightful from myself as well as others.
That does not mean that lecturing is the wrong way to teach. It simply means that
my identity, unlike my mentor's, is more fulfilled in dialogue. When I was young
and did not know who I was, I needed someone to model the intellectual gift that
might be mine. But now, in midlife, knowing myself better, my identity demands
that I use my gift in interaction and interdependence with others.
Here, I believe, is the proper and powerful role of technique: as we learn more
about who we are, we can learn techniques that reveal rather than conceal the person-
hood from which good teaching comes. We no longer need to use technique to mask
the subjective self, as the culture of professionalism encourages us to do. Now we
can use technique to manifest more fully the gift of self from which our best
teaching comes.
The self-knowledge that comes from these reflections is crucial to my teaching,
for it reveals a complexity within me that is within my students as well. In my case,
the “I” who teaches is both intimidated by and attracted to the life of the mind; for
a long time it was bedeviled by a sense that the intellectual work it felt called to
do was nonetheless a fraud. This “I,” despite its intrigue with ideas, was once so
unsure of itself that it welcomed a mentor whose performance barred partic-
ipation. But today, this same “I” finds its own performance boring and needs to
be nurtured in dialogue.
When I forget my own inner multiplicity and my own long and continuing journey
toward selfhood, my expectations of students become excessive and unreal. If I
can remember the inner pluralism of my own soul and the slow pace of my own
self-emergence, I will be better able to serve the pluralism among my students at
the pace of their young lives. By remembering our mentors, we remember our-
selves—and by remembering ourselves, we remember our students.
Looking back, I realize that I was blessed with mentors at every crucial stage of my
young life, at every point where my identity needed to grow: in adolescence, in col-
lege, in graduate school, and early in my professional career. But a funny thing
happened on the way to full adulthood: the mentors stopped coming. For several
years I waited for the next one in vain, and for several years my own growth was
on hold.
Then I realized what was happening. I was no longer an apprentice, so I no longer
needed mentors. It was my turn to become a mentor to someone else. I needed to
turn around and look for the new life emerging behind me, to offer to younger
people the gift that had been given to me when I was young. As I did, my identity
and integrity had new chances to evolve in each new encounter with my students'
lives.
Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of
teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance
floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the
young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweav-
ing the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.
===
Subjects That Chose Us
Many of us were called to teach by encountering not only a mentor but also a par-
ticular field of study. We were drawn to a body of knowledge because it shed light
on our identity as well as on the world. We did not merely find a subject to
teach—the subject also found us. We may recover the heart to teach by remem-
bering how that subject evoked a sense of self that was only dormant in us before
we encountered the subject's way of naming and framing life.
Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this
kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. “Why do people want to
adopt another culture?” she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching
and into life. “Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't
name them.”5 French culture gave Kaplan a way of claiming an identity and in-
tegrity she could not find in the culture to which she was born.
Recalling a course she taught in which a bigoted young man learned to appreciate
the stranger through encountering another people in another language, Kaplan re-
flects: “Moments like this make me think that speaking a foreign language is ... a
chance for growth, for freedom, for liberation from the ugliness of our received
ideas and mentalities.”6
But Kaplan also understands the shadow side of a borrowed identity: “Learning
French did me some harm by giving me a place to hide. If life got too messy, I
could take off into my second world.” But, she says, “writing about it has made
me air my suspicions, my anger, my longings, to people for whom it's come as a
total surprise.”7 The self-knowledge she gained by asking why she was attracted to
her field helped her reconnect, wrestle with, and even redeem troubling events
and relationships in her life, renewing her teacher's heart.
Reading Kaplan's reflections (richer by far in shadow and light than my brief re-
view suggests), I was encouraged to make my own. My undergraduate majors
were philosophy and sociology, and many of the details I once knew about those
fields have long since leached away. But I still recall, thirty-five years later, the mo-
ment I discovered C. Wright Mills's idea of the “sociological imagination.”8 I was
not merely taken with it—I was possessed by it.
The essence of his idea is simple, but it was radical to me: we cannot see what is
“out there” merely by looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through
which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would
otherwise remain invisible.
Mills taught me how to view the world through the lenses of social theory, and
when I took my first look, the world jumped out at me as if I had donned the 3-D
movie glasses that Hollywood was hawking at the time. I saw the invisible struc-
tures and secret signals that shape our social lives, that have a power over us that
I thought resided only in face-to-face relationships. I was astonished at this new
vision of life in which people walked about, not freely, as I had imagined, but con-
trolled by strings attached to their minds and hearts by invisible puppeteers.
Why was I so deeply drawn to the idea of the sociological imagination? Why did it
become such a defining feature of my worldview? By reflecting on those ques-
tions, I have re-membered some key features of who I am.
Intellectually, the idea of the sociological imagination spoke to me because at age
eighteen I had begun to understand that what you see is not necessarily what you
get. I was a child of the 1950s, with its many social fictions, so it took time for me
to see that the visible performance of individuals and groups was only the “on-
stage” aspect of things, that reality has “backstage” dynamics far more influential
than the performance we see up front.
But my attraction to Mills's concept was more than intellectual—it helped me
come to terms with some of my deepest personal fears. As a young person, I
found the on-stage world both seductive and intimidating. It was an arena of visi-
bility where I wanted to perform and become known, but also an arena where my
competence would be tested and surely found wanting. As I came to understand
the backstage realities revealed by the sociological imagination, I was able to
shake off some of my performance fears.
By looking backstage and seeing how human, how klutzy, how ordinary the
mechanics of performance really are—how unlike the glitz and glamour of on-
stage performance itself—I could ask myself, “If they can do it, why not me?” This
backstage knowledge gave me the comfort of knowing that all heroes have feet of
clay; it had the calming effect of the counsel given to nervous public speakers,
“Imagine your audience naked.”
But my attraction to the sociological imagination went deeper still—beyond intel-
lectual interest, beyond performance fears, to a gap within my own soul. Mills's
distinction between the on-stage show and backstage reality mirrored a great di-
vide in my inner life. Outwardly, I had learned how to make my performance seem
relatively smooth and accomplished, but inwardly, I felt anxious and fumbling and
inept.
The constant contradiction between how I experienced myself and how other peo-
ple viewed me created a painful, sometimes crippling sense of fraudulence. But
the sociological imagination and its view of societal duplicity helped me under-
stand how common that contradiction is, how basic to the human condition, and
my sense of fraudulence became less onerous.
It has taken me a long time to turn Mills's insight from an analysis of our society
toward an understanding of myself. The sociological imagination is easily used as
one of those “debunking” tools, beloved of social science, that allows us to stand
detached by the side of the road as the parade passes by, sniping at its silliness
and pretending to be above it all.
For a long time, I stood off to the side as critic and judge, and now I understand
why: I was projecting onto society all the fraudulence I felt but could not face in
myself, and I was using that projection as a way of evading my own dividedness. I
no longer want to live that way—which is why I take pains in my writing to
counterbalance the truth of the sociological imagination.
Earlier in this chapter, I insisted that our inner world has a reality and a power that
can keep us from being victims of circumstance and compel us to take respon-
sibility for our own lives. In effect, I argued that the world of social structures and
signals need not dictate our lives, that the sociological imagination that so en-
tranced me as a young man (and has its grip on me yet) does not hold all the an-
swers. In the very act of writing this chapter, I have been encountering my sub-
ject—and myself—anew, still respectful of the power of social facts but unwilling
to use that knowledge as an escape from personal responsibility.
What I have learned about my identity as a teacher from this re-membering is, to
some extent, encouraging: I would not be an advocate of the power of inner reality
if I had not reached some degree of congruence between my on-stage and back-
stage lives.
But I have also learned that my conflict between on-stage and backstage reality is
far from being resolved—it continues to come up in my teaching. That conflict
was the theme of the teaching stories I told at the start of this chapter, stories
whose drama, such as it is, lies in the tension between my external response to
classroom events and my internal sense of incompetence.
One of my favorite essays on teaching is Jane Tompkins's “Pedagogy of the
Distressed.”9 It seems to have been written directly to my divided condition. With
wonderful candor, Tompkins says that her obsession as a teacher had not been
with helping students learn what they wanted and needed to know but rather with
“(a) showing the students how smart I was; (b) showing them how knowl-
edgeable I was; and (c) showing them how well prepared I was for class. I had
been putting on a performance whose true goal was not to help the students learn
but to act in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me.”
Then she asks, “How did it come to be that our main goal as academicians turned
out to be performance?” Her answer rings true to me—fear: “Fear of being shown
up for what you are: a fraud, stupid, ignorant, a clod, a dolt, a sap, a weakling,
someone who can't cut the mustard.”
That is how it sometimes is for me. Driven by fear that my backstage ineptitude
will be exposed, I strive to make my on-stage performance slicker and smoother—
and in the process, make it less and less likely that my students will learn anything
other than how to cover up and show off. I conceal my own heart and am unable
to weave the fabric of connectedness that teaching and learning require.
Once again: when I seek my identity and integrity, what I find is not always a
proud and shining thing. The discoveries I make about myself when I remember
the encounters that have shaped and revealed my selfhood are sometimes embar-
rassing—but they are also real. Whatever the cost in embarrassment, I will know
myself better, and thus be a better teacher, when I acknowledge the forces at play
within me instead of allowing them to wreak witless havoc on my work.
Florida Scott-Maxwell, writing in her mid-eighties, made the point powerfully:
“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you
truly possess all you have been and done ... you are fierce with reality.”10
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