Chapter 1B

The Not-so Prodigal Son

I was standing at the reception counter in the main office of my old high school when the subject of my query walked up to stand beside me.
“Mr. Krauskopf?” I asked.
“Yes.” He replied, turning to look at me.
“Mr. Krauskopf, I don’t know if you will remember me. But my name is David Brock, and fifteen years ago, I was in your 10th grade English class.”
“David Brock!” He exclaimed, taking a small leap back as if in shock. “Now there’s a blast from the past!”
I had to suppress a smile. He had clearly not lost his flair for being slightly over-dramatic.
“What brings you back here?” He asked.
“Actually, I came to see you.” I told him. “If you have a minute. I’m a teacher myself now and so I was hoping I might catch you during a planning period. That’s what I was asking about.” I pointed with my head to indicate the receptionist.
“You’re in luck.” He replied. “You caught me right before lunch duty. I have about 30 minutes.” He indicated the pile he had placed on the counter and said, “I need to take care of this paper work first, but then we can go have a seat in the teacher’s lounge.”
I nodded in both agreement and understanding and waited while he finished up with what looked like lesson plan logs.
“So you’re a teacher now.” He remarked as we walked.
“Yes. And that’s actually why I am here.” I replied. “To say ‘thank you’ after all these years.”
He looked bemused.
“You see,” I continued. “I’ve just been named the Outstanding Biology Teacher of Missouri, and as I realized how much of that I owe to all my own former teachers, I knew it was time to come back and say ‘thank you’.”
I paused to hold the lounge door open.
“Besides, I now know firsthand how much having one of my students coming back to say thanks means.” I said.
“Have you been able to see Bob Flavin?” He asked as we sat down.
I nodded. My old math teacher had been thrilled to see me at his classroom door.
“He was just finishing a class when I arrived.” I replied. “We had a nice long visit.”
We both sat down then and simply started “talking shop.” I told him how much his own teaching continued to influence me and how I acted in the classroom. I shared my passion for teaching science and how thrilling it was to watch a kid get excited about biology. We shared some laughs about the differences in view from “the other side of the desk,” and it felt like the thirty minutes was up scarcely before it began.
“Let me walk you to your car.” He said, and we exchanged some observations about how Dayton had changed over the years as we left the building.
But when we got to my car and I started to unlock it, he placed his hand on my shoulder and spoke.
“David, thank you. Congratulations again on your award and know that I am proud for you. It sounds like you have become quite the biology teacher.” He smiled. “But as you move forward in your career, David, always remember: care at least a little more about the kids than you do about the subject.”
He then gave my shoulder an affection squeeze, bid me safe-travels, and headed back into the building. Watching him go, I stood rooted to the spot, unable to get into the car as I processed those words. I shook my head in wonder: even after all these years, he was still teaching me how to be a better me.

A Community of Metaphor Makers

Many notable educators speak regularly about the importance of “[working] hard to make the subject matter itself be the intriguing focus that gets the students interested”⁸.  Yet one of the ironies in education is that almost none of them have any experience in K-12 teaching or were, at best, “a school teacher for only one year.”⁹  As a consequence, I think a critical piece of the act of teaching gets overlooked in much of the writing about education, which is that in the K-12 world, our “subject”—the “Other” with which we are in a learning relationship—is ultimately the child, not some specific discipline.  Our “eternal conversation”¹⁰ is about the total self of the individual student–about what it ultimately means to be authentically human–and what that means for the classroom is that the traditional disciplines or subjects become tools students use to produce the explanations about reality, the “metaphors,” which they will live in relationship with to help them become who they are.  Math, science, literature, history, languages–they all become “lenses” through which students can examine reality in order to learn the most important “subject” of all:  themselves. 

At the K-12 level, then, teaching really becomes the act of engaging students in the deliberate creation of the “self” through constructing relationships between students and the meanings they make with a given discipline’s tools.  Instead of generating a “community of truth”¹¹ around some subject, teaching is about involving and guiding children in their own development through different ways of understanding the universe in which they live.  Hence, the definition of teaching we need as educators to generate genuine learning in our schools is: to teach is to immerse students in the communal practice of composing our metaphors for reality. 

Yet even this alternative to how most teachers understand their task will only work if we recognize that the key to immersing children in any of the methods humans have for constructing meaning is the creation of a certain kind of relationship in the classroom.  A student’s capacity to grasp and to use any subject’s explanatory “myths” depends entirely on the quality of their encounter with a teacher’s own metaphor making process, and that’s where embracing the role of co-learner enters the picture.  Teachers must make their own struggle to comprehend the world through mathematics or literature or chemistry, etc. just as real to students, as much a “person” or “Other” to them, as the students’ own struggles are.  Likewise, these student struggles must become “Others” whom the teacher interacts with because only when children witness their teacher joining with them in constructing a “self”–using the very metaphor-making process the teacher is challenging them to master!–will children take both the risk and the moral responsibility to learn how to do the same.¹² Putting it a little less philosophically, if we want what happens in our classes to be vitally real and transforming for our students, we have to show them that it is vitally real and transforming for us.

Thus, in order for both teaching and learning to happen successfully, what we must do as educators is participate fully in relating our own use of a subject to create a “self” to the similar efforts of our students.  We must be authentically engaged in becoming our own genuine “selfs” in our classrooms to turn the “teachable moment” into the “learning moment.”  We must immerse our students with us in the communal practice of composing reality’s metaphors, and we will need to be so engaged all the time if we want to transform our schools into places where learning happens regularly and intentionally. 

I just wish that were as easy to do in practice as it is to write down on paper.