If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s,
we rob them of tomorrow.
–John Dewey
A teacher affects eternity;
he can never tell where his influence stops.
–Henry Adams
The Solomonic Moment
It was the end of the day, and several students from my second period class were back in my room, working on their experiments when I discovered a looming disaster.
“Beccy,” I said, getting up from my desk to walk over to her. “I noticed in your group’s latest draft that you still haven’t fixed the serious typo in your experimental protocol.”
I leaned over the table where she was conducting chemical tests on her soil samples and set the copy of the report down. She looked at where I was pointing with my pen and then glanced back and forth between me and the open container of extracting fluid.
“Goggles, Mr. Brock?” She chided teasingly.
“Oops.” I replied, pulling them on from where they hung around my neck.
She and Katherine both smiled at this momentary lapse in my preoccupation with eye protection, and then they turned their attention to where I had circled the problem on their report. Beccy traced down the page with the tip of her finger, and they both frowned at the same time.
“No, Mr. Brock, this is what we actually did,” said Katherine. “We took the first samples from under the mulch on the flowerbeds by the flag pole, the next from under the path back to the woods, and the last set from the playground. Then we took our negative control from the front lawn and the bare patch in the construction site like you suggested.”
“Yes, but you took them all on the same day, right?” I responded, pointing at the paper. “That’s what’s missing from your protocol. You need a step in there telling us that; otherwise, anyone trying to replicate your experiment might take one set of samples one day, another the next, and so forth.”
Beccy shook her head, and Katherine now looked worried.
“But Mr. Brock, that’s what we actually did.” Beccy protested. “We took the samples from the flag pole one day and performed all the tests on that soil. Then took the samples from the backwoods the next class and so on.”
It was one of those “Oh my God!” moments as a teacher, and I must not have kept my initial reaction hidden because suddenly there was real fear in their eyes. Fear that only grew as I stood there in silence for several moments frantically pondering what to do.
“Don’t you remember me telling all of you the very first day of the project that soil is alive?” I asked them. “And that you therefore have to take all your samples at the same time and perform any test on them at the same time?”
They both nodded and Katherine responded. “We did that. We took all three replications from the flowerbeds at the same time and did the tests on them at the same time. Then we went the next class to the backwoods and did the same thing.”
“But Katherine, your group is trying to determine the impact of different types of mulch on the soil!” They both looked puzzled, and I could tell they still weren’t getting it. “How,” I asked urgently, “can you compare the pH of the soil from the flowerbeds with that of any of your other samples if you didn’t control for changes in the environment? What if it rained between the time you took your samples? How can you know that it was the mulch affecting the pH and not the rain?”
Now the two of them looked crestfallen as the implication of what I was saying sank in, and I nodded and gestured vigorously with both my hands.
“Exactly!” I implored. “You have no meaningful data whatsoever to discuss your hypothesis! You’re entire experiment is effectively worthless.”
“But Mr. Brock!” Beccy replied in horror. “What are we going to do? This project is our final exam. It’s twenty-five percent of our grade! We’ve worked so hard on this!”
Four weeks. I thought. Four weeks they’ve all been in here during free periods and after school and even lunch. Four weeks I’ve been reading drafts, and we didn’t catch the mistake until now! I studied their frightened faces and felt defeated. I sighed heavily and gnawed on my lip.
“I’m sorry.” I told them, shrugging dejectedly. “There’s no way I can avoid penalizing you for this since I so explicitly and repeatedly said something at the start of the project. Your grade’s going to take a hit.”
I didn’t know what else to say, and for a moment, the three of us just stood there, trapped in our own individual silences. Finally, I said, “For now, go ahead and finish these tests and clean up. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
They were both fighting back tears by then, and Beccy actually sniffled. But they dutifully turned their attention back to the testing equipment in front of them, and I stood up to go back to my desk. I could overhear them talking about how their parents were going to kill them, and I thought to myself: God, I hate having to be judge and jury in this job!
I had only taken a total of two steps when I heard “Um…Mr. Brock?”
I glanced over to where another group was working and walked over to them. “Yes?” I asked.
“We think we may have the same problem, Mr. Brock,” said Caroline, cautiously.
“Yes, we also took samples on different days.” Parilee added.
Worried faces looked back at me, and I shook my head.
“No, your group wanted to see how the weather changes the bacteria levels in the soil, right? You’re supposed to be taking samples on different days.” I replied.
“But we took the samples from our two sites on different days.” Caroline pushed back. “Doesn’t that invalidate our ability to compare them just like it does with the other group?”
I shook my head, puzzled.
“No…I don’t see why it would.” I answered slowly. But they still looked worried, and apparently, I was the one who wasn’t getting it this time because suddenly I heard a chair slam down behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see Beccy angrily storm out of the room and thought, What’s all the sudden up with her?
“Mr. Brock, I don’t think you’re hearing what we’re saying.” Parilee insisted.
I turned my attention back to the three of them and motioned for Shannon to hand me their most recent draft of their report. I leafed through it and started to reread their protocol.
“I understand.” I asserted, studying the steps of their experiment. “You took your soil samples from your negative control and your test site on day 1, then went out the next class two days later and….” My gut sank as I came to the word.
“No,” said Caroline anxiously. “That’s our point. We took three samples of our negative control over three days, took three samples of our grassy site another three days, and then repeated it all two more times.”
I stared in horror for a moment and then simply hung my head. I have failed as a teacher, I told myself.
Head down, I said, “So you not only didn’t replicate your samples at the same time like I told people to do; you took your negative control and your independent variable on different days.”
“‘Fraid so,” replied Parilee.
I raised my head and considered her. “You, therefore, effectively have no negative control and therefore have no actual experiment either, do you?” I looked away in despair and muttered, sotto voce. “Well, at least I now know why Beccy stormed out of the room.”
My brightest students! I thought. I’m looking at failing half a class of my brightest students, and God knows what I haven’t caught in the drafts of my weaker kids!
I swung around to Katherine, who was watching us, and asked her to please go find Beccy and bring her back. Then, I turned back to the group I was standing next to and slowly shook my head a couple of times.
“God, I hate Solomonic moments like this one.” I muttered.
“Huh?” replied Caroline.
I glanced over at her. “You know? The story of Solomon? The two women and the baby?” I answered.
They all looked confused, and I was bemused.
“Two women both claiming the same baby is theirs are brought before King Solomon to determine who the real mother is.” I told them. “He decides to order the baby cut in half knowing that the true mother would rather give her baby up than see it killed. A Solomonic moment.”
“You’re planning on chopping one of us in half, Mr. Brock?” Parilee tried to joke.
“No,” I chuckled sadly. “I wish it were that easy.”
“Mr. Brock…” Caroline interrupted, nodding for me to turn around. I did and saw that Katherine was back with Beccy, and I motioned for the two of them to come join us.
“Beccy, I need to apologize. You, too, Katherine.” I said. “I’m sorry I reacted the way I did a little earlier. I was excessively harsh, and you did not deserve that. My apologies. I should have been a better teacher and I wasn’t.” I then looked Beccy directly in the eyes. “And I’m particularly sorry that it looked like I was unfairly being so hard on all of you while acting like someone else who had done the exact same thing had done nothing wrong. That had to hurt, and again, I’m sorry.”
She gave me a little half-smile in response but remained standing there in silence, clearly still very concerned–as were all the rest of them when I turned around to face all of them. Again, I reflected on how badly I had failed them as their teacher.
Finally, Caroline broke the silence and said, “So what are we going to do, Mr. Brock?”
“I don’t know.” I answered truthfully, frowning. “Obviously with so many of you making the exact same mistake, at some level I have to own my part of the responsibility for that, and I can’t penalize you for something that’s my fault.” I studied all five of them for a moment and then continued. “At the same time, the point of this project is to assess how well you’ve learned to design experiments, and so at some level, I also need to hold you all accountable for your failure to do that.”
I shook my head yet again and cupped my chin with my hand, staring off, unfocused. “You’re not learning anything if I simply penalize you.” I said, thinking out loud. “That’s just punishment. And the point of this class is not to avoid getting punished but to gain understanding. For you to learn and grow. And failing all of you does neither…”
My voice trailed off, and I felt the full weight of my power. Then I knew what I had to do for the immediate moment.
“Look,” I said. “It’s the end of the day, and you’re tired; I’m tired. And exhausted people don’t make good decisions. So I will go home tonight and think about what’s the best solution to this problem, and we’ll all talk about it during class tomorrow. I know that won’t take away any of your worry or anxiety right now, but I want to do what’s best and that’s going to require some thought. Okay?”
It was clearly not what they wanted to hear, but they all murmured their assent anyway, and by unspoken agreement, we all went back to what we had all previously been doing. They began packing up to leave while I returned to my desk, and Caroline, Parilee, and Shannon chatted in subdued tones about who would still work on which part of their report; while Beccy and Katherine silently put their chemical testing materials away. I faced the pile of remaining report drafts and had to swallow my fear at what else I might now find lurking in those pages. Watching the girls go, I knew it was going to be a very long night.
The Ideals We Espouse
At the intersection of good teaching and real learning is the relationship between the teacher and the student. Authentic instruction may look like students “doing themselves” what they study, and genuine understanding may look like these same children “knowing another as they would be known.” But neither of these actions we have discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 can every actually happen in the classroom without the right kind of collaboration between those who do them. The connection between “master” and “disciple” has always been at the very heart of education, and the quality of the community we form in the classroom determines everything about the quality of teaching and learning that take place there. Put simply, those of us in this profession “relate to others for a living,”1 and the intrinsic character of that relating is what decides how successful any of us are at educating people.
The logical question, then, is what kinds of properties make a teacher-student relationship a good one, and the short answer is: those that produce interdependence and, therefore, true community. Only to the degree that children experience us as needing them for our success can we likewise help them to succeed, and the most effective educators see students as the educational colleagues they actually are and treats them accordingly. The adept teacher will always value children as thinkers in their own right, treating them as partners in the educational process, and in fact, rather than posture as a minor deity, this teacher will quite deliberately reveal and own mistakes and the consequent growth from them precisely because doing so shows students that their teacher is also struggling to construct a self and that they play an active role in this struggle. She, he, or they will let students know that they are as much a part of the teacher’s own journey to become fully human as the teacher is of theirs. Thus, what makes the teacher-student relationship a genuinely good one is the teacher’s willingness to share his or her humanity with their students rather than hide behind a wall of authority and rank
That’s not easy to do, though, when an essential part of the job is “to evaluate and grade the work students do.”2 Those who teach judge for a living, and in the face of that fundamental disparity in power, we have to wonder whether the genuine interdependence I’m claiming both teaching and learning need is even possible. After all, how can anyone ever truly experience someone else as an equal if their relationship is hierarchical in its very nature?
Yet, the danger for learning:
is not power and status differences between teachers and students but the lack of interdependence that those differences encourage. [Yes,] students are dependent on teachers for grades–but what are teachers dependent on students for? If we cannot answer that question with something as real to us as grades are to students, [then learning simply] will not happen.3
Thus, what’s at issue isn’t whether there is a hierarchy of power between teachers and students but how this power gets manifested. If we invite children into dialogue with our own humanity, it is possible to assess and guide them in ways that promote equality instead of injustice or disdain. But to accomplish this, we must “abandon our self-protective professional autonomy and make ourselves as dependent on our students as they are on us [if we want to] move closer to the interdependence that [learning] requires.”4 Only then, “when we can say ‘please’ because we need our students and ‘thank you’ because we are genuinely grateful for them,” can the obstacles to authentic teacher-student relationship fall away and learning “happen for everyone in surprising and life-giving ways.”5
But what exactly does it mean to say “please” and “thank you” to our students? Or to enter into dialogue with their humanity? The academic answer, ironically, is actually quite simple: invite them into our work. Good teachers are always sharing the stories of their own challenges to master a particular topic, and they regularly ask students for feedback about how a lesson went. They suggest the latest books they are reading in their field, and some even work with students to publish. “I don’t know, but let’s find out” is a way of life in the classrooms where students are partners in the learning process, and “this is where I found the answer” is always part of the final response–except there never truly is a final response and the accomplished teachers share that about themselves as well.
Thus, by being visible as fellow learners to our students, we reveal that portion of our own self, and as we have our students “read what their teachers have written, join research teams with their teachers, and hear their teachers disclose problems they are wrestling with,”6 we are saying “please participate with me in my own learning about this subject” and “thank you for helping me know it better myself.” Hence, what it means at least scholastically to enter into interdependent relationship with our students is to constantly model and display the life a particular subject or academic discipline lives inside of you.
However, as I have oft repeated throughout this project, the K–12 world is ultimately not about the specific subject being taught but about how to build a self using the metaphors of that subject, and from that perspective, sharing in a dialogue about the struggle to become more fully human takes on an entirely different meaning. Now saying “please” and “thank you” involves not only modeling what it means to be a learner but what it means to be a mature person. In every interaction we have with children, we reveal the full complexity of adulthood and our own choices about it, and whenever we engage a student in anything at all, we demonstrate in how we treat them the values and convictions we hold worthwhile.
Hence, if we think honest self-reflection and respect for others are vital components of the authentic individual, we do like I did with Beccy all those years ago and admit our mistakes and apologize for them. If we believe in the value of love–in “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing…another’s spiritual growth”7–then we let our students know that we regard them enough to spend a sleepless night trying to find a way to help them grow from a mistake rather than simply condemning them for it. If we…the list is endless, and it can be as modest an act as grading and returning assignments in a timely fashion as a sign of respect or as difficult a one as counseling a child in crisis. But the good teachers “attempt to live the ideals that they espouse to others,”8 and in so doing, “they become living examples for students”9 of what it means to strive to become a complete and authentic person.
The teacher-student relationship at its best, then, is about inviting children to “please join me in practicing what I preach” and sharing with them our “thank you for challenging me to be the best person I can.” It is about living with them in the classroom and creating there together the kind of community we would all want our greater society to be, and it is about collaborating with them in their learning to understand what will happen if we don’t. It is about working to uncover the potential all of us have to be worthy and wise individuals, and it is about helping to overcome the alienation we feel when we fail to realize this potential fully. Thus, ultimately, the teacher-student relationship is about how we choose to care for one another, and that is why its character is so vital to the process of teaching and learning. The interaction between those who teach and those who learn is a microcosm of all human interaction, and so how educators treat both their subjects and their students will determine how the children do likewise. If we manipulate and deform, students will manipulate and deform; if we love and value, they will love and value. It’s as simple as that.10
Light a Candle 