Summer Reading: The Courage to Teach
Summer is when teachers take time to breathe, but in no way is that time a vacation. Most of us just try to catch up on everything we let slip during the school year, relationships included. While teachers’ days are spent caring for 30-150 students, there is no way to properly nurture the full spectrum of needs our own loved ones expect and deserve. Physical needs are met with a hope that the extra time and attention that can be given during the summer days will be enough to sustain them through the next school year. The reality is that the patience, attention, concern, sympathy, energy, and problem solving that we expend trying to bring out the best in our students exhausts the reserves we need to care for our own families and ourselves. And a one-hour, district-mandated in-service on self care is not the answer. Though, in all honesty, I’m not sure what is — or if there is one that can achieve a balanced solution in an unbalanced system.
Often, during those summer months, as we are trying to reconnect, reaffirm, re-support and reorganize, we are also expected to re-educate. Graduate school classes are expected, and thus, time in a classroom, time researching and writing academic papers that take days to write and are graded and tossed within mere minutes. We are drained from our limited reserves. Again, an unbalanced system perpetuates itself. But, once in a rare occurrence, more is given than taken. Every now and then, a gift is given. In my case, in one graduate class, a fellow student recommended a book that changed my life. I constantly read, but I generally do not expect a book to alter my being… entertain and possibly reveal, yes, but not ever to do what I had not had the time to do — to figure out my why.
Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach felt like it was written for me (and apparently millions like me, hence the best seller status). Palmer reached into my classroom, my psyche, and spoke truth about my struggles, my successes, and the forces that limit what I try to achieve when teaching. My copy became saturated with coffee and tea spills as I circled, commented, and highlighted the text while capturing a few moments before my family rose in the morning, or at the community pool as the kids played Marco Polo. I read and reread the text like I had opened a treasure map to what I had always sought: teaching with purpose. Achieving, but stepping beyond the state-mandated tests, over encompassing and unwieldy curriculum, and administrators bound by so many rules and too little vision. Teaching that encouraged connectedness and nurtured my curiosity and love of learning, as well as my students’.
For the last two decades of my career, each summer, I pulled my well-worn hardcover from my bookcase and enjoyed the words that would reaffirm my why, my purpose, and to remind me of the sacred nature of this chosen profession. Sacred, as Palmer explains, worthy of respect. Each component of the teaching process should hold that single idea—worthy of respect. Because, as he goes on to explain, in a culture of disrespect, education suffers the worst fate—it becomes banal. How can we possibly teach about the incredible complexities of our world, help our students find amazement in the mystery and the uncovering of the answers, if we find it all so boring?
Finding the sacred in the profession is the only way we can navigate a world that is desperately trying to deride the need for what we give. In a world with Google and answers that can be found in a millisecond, it would be easy to imagine educators as babysitters and our gifts as dispensable. What Palmer shares in his gift to us is a reminder that our mission is to open the universe and its endless questions and possibilities to our students — not to box in and limit them with answers. We should, with our students, constantly be asking more questions to, as Palmer says, “Groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard and gallop over the thick sun-struck hills every day.”