The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south and turns to the north;
round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:5-6, 9 (NIV)
What are the conditions
that might make it possible for us to operate
at a modest level of prophetic inspiration,
to bring a daily beauty to our lives,
sustaining to ourselves, our students,
and our communities?
—Mary Rose O’Reilley
If you have read even elements of Part I or Part II of this project of mine or followed any of my updates since I finished the body of my e-book in the spring of 2020, you know that I have focused nearly 100% of my attention on either discussing how to improve what takes place in our classrooms or examining the very pragmatic challenges we confront in education today. Only rarely have I addressed some of my personal motivations for why I teach or spoken about the teaching sojourn itself.
Yet I find myself struggling this school year with one of my classes in ways that I have not had to in a very long time—which is both proof-positive that you never fully master this profession and a humbling reminder of my own “work-in-progress” as an individual even after six decades of existence. Granted, the value of so many years (both in and out of the classroom) is the insight that this is not my first time feeling utterly ineffectual with a group of students nor am I likely to fail to have some modicum of positive impact on some child under my care (I must never forget Mark!). However, what those decades of insight also bring is the recognition that it is possible to “stay too long at the party.” Effective teaching requires authentic engagement, and authentic engagement demands: embracing the role of co-learner; appropriately intimate rapport; and a thorough understanding of the neuroscience of the brain. And it doesn’t matter how good you may be at any one of them individually, without all three, the “stool” doesn’t stand and genuine learning doesn’t happen.
Which is what I find myself wrestling with right now. I cannot seem to generate the necessary rapport to generate the necessary investment on the part of a group of my students, and what I’m not sure about at this moment is whether I’m simply dealing with a situational issue or a generational one. If the former, I can accept a transient failure. Those moments of loss are painful and to be fought against at all costs. But my finitude can never be completely overcome, and I have had and will have classes where I perform inadequately in my keystone niche as the teacher. Sin is real, and I will not succeed with every class or every child I encounter during my career.
However, if the issue is a generational one, that gives me greater pause. In a world where many in the younger generations openly prefer an AI chatbot for a romantic partner—and get upset when software updates alter their “significant other” (oddly enough simulating what can happen between actual human beings)—I don’t know that I have the cognitive tools to develop appropriately intimate rapport anymore. Nor do I think I would want the tools that might be needed today. As was once wisely observed, “the ‘secrets’ of good teaching are the same as the secrets of good living: seeing one’s self without blinking, offering hospitality to the alien other, having compassion for suffering, speaking truth to power, being present and being real” (O’Reilley, p. ix). None of which are possible in the zombified digital realm that seems to consume today’s young (and, in fairness, many of their elders as well).
The simple truth is that I choose not to live unable to read a map, perpetually terrified of FOMO, attending to conspiracy theories, and addicted to a screen. Yet in doing so, am I making it no longer possible to relate existentially to the realities of my students in the ways needed to develop authentic engagement’s required rapport? For example, for decades, I deliberately listened to their music because I knew the connections it could bring. However, for the last five years, I have been unable to bring myself to do so because I cannot find the tolerance within me to expose myself to something I find totally banal and empty of all meaning. Has my own personal journey, therefore, reached a relational wall through which I can no longer construct a door?
I wish I had an answer to that question—it is obviously part of my conundrum—yet what truly unsettles me about the current situation is the memory it stirs of my grandfather. He and my grandmother acquired a VCR sometime in the late 1980s (the recall of how alludes me), and I remember my dad trying to show my grandfather how to program it to record TV shows. To which my grandfather firmly declared, “NO.” At nearly 80, he had simply reached the end of his willingness to learn yet-one-more-thing in a lifetime that had started before most homes in this country had plumbing and which had eventually witnessed humans on the moon and space probes taking pictures of Neptune. He was done, and he was okay with being done.
Have I, I wonder, reached a similar moment in my teaching? Have I reached the point of “done” with the generation of students now entering my classroom? That is what I find myself struggling to resolve, and it is a disquieting experience as anyone who has read my work can well imagine. On the one hand, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes reminds me not to take my challenge with this one class too seriously; as my maternal grandmother oft said, “this, too, shall pass.” On the other hand, the wisdom of Mary Rose O’Reilley reminds me that “it’s impossible to hear a subtle call if you do not create a conscious time to listen to it” (pp. 43-44); so what might I not be hearing that I should be?
One answer, of course, is that it is perhaps my disquiet itself to which I should be listening. The fact that I have kept trying to connect with this class, one thing after another, attempting to breathe life into what feels daily like a black hole of ennui, is probably indicative that I am not “done” in the way my grandfather once was. If I did not care, I would not be so dissatisfied with my efforts to educate this collection of students. Hence, maybe I need to “cut myself a little slack,” as they say, and accept that working my hardest this year is simply going to have to be the best I can do with this group for this year.
And I think I would be okay with that if not for the fact that I am not experiencing this challenge with my other courses. I’m co-learning, rapporting, and neurosciencing just fine with my juniors and seniors, and in fact, on my course evaluation this past week for my Genetics class, one of my students—in response to my query “what is one thing you would never want me to change about this course?”—replied “you as the teacher.” Hence, I am clearly engaging authentically with at least a subset of the population at my school; it’s just the 9th grade which is proving so intractable this year.
Which pivots me back to the generational question. Ninth graders have been my area of expertise for nearly my entire career. Indeed, for 14 years on the 9th Grade advisory team at my former school, my friend and Grade Dean, Paige and I would jokingly refer to ourselves as each new class’s “mom & dad.” Therefore, finding myself alienated from a group I have historically been so effective with as an educator is dispiriting and begs for an answer to “why?” that has so far alluded me this year. I do recognize that I could simply be struggling with the learning fallout from the pandemic (this specific group would have been in Middle school throughout it), and I recognize that I may just not have fully evolved and adapted my teaching toolkit yet to meet such a need. But that recognition doesn’t make it any easier to watch still another attempt to generate the conditions for meaningful learning in this class fall short, and I cannot avoid wondering what in this situation am I missing? And how does that “what” need to inform my future as a teacher?
The school year, of course, is not over, and I am too much the scientist not to finish collecting all the data before coming to any final conclusions. Furthermore, those same decades of insight mentioned earlier also remind me that this is not my first time questioning whether I should still be at the “party,” and it is unlikely that it will be my last. Again, it is when I am no longer having this internal dialogue about my capacities as a teacher that I should probably be bringing the journey to an end.
Until then, I have another lesson to plan.
References
O’Reilley, Mary Rose (1998) Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.
Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) Conspiracy Theories Then and Now. Scientific American. Pp. 80-81.
Campbell, R. M. (Dec. 2023) AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security. Scientific American. Pp. 73-74.
The Pulse (Jan. 5, 2024) Virtual Worlds, Virtual Lives. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1200586530/virtual-worlds-virtual-lives.
Light a Candle 