Dare to Teach, Chapter 4: Love/Compassion

We all know the cliché “Students don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”  Even as I write these lines I find myself smiling with the simplicity of such an idea.  Those of us who have spent much time in a classroom know that it’s not always that easy to care for certain students... much less to show them that we care.

Teaching is the hardest work possible. I’m sorry to all the lawyers, doctors and builders out there, but it’s true.  I’ll not try to defend in any detail this idea, because I’m writing to teachers, and right now they are just smiling in agreement.  You could say that we are in a no-win situation.  No matter how hard we try, we will forever see our efforts foiled on the nasty rocks of cultural apathy.

This fact has forced many great teachers out of the classroom.  They just could not handle the hopeless situation that is the classroom.  They reported that they tried their best, but their best was not good enough, and so they went into a profession where their efforts were more respected and rewarded.

I totally get that attitude.  I do.  I am not saying in this essay that the effective teacher... the integral teacher does not struggle with disappointment and disillusionment.  I would say that the greater the teacher... the greater the disappointment... the greater the disillusionment!  No kidding.  Sorry if that shocks some of you young teachers who hope that some day you will reach this point in your career when you will not feel this dark night of the soul all the time.

If you stop feeling that kind of pain then you need to get out of the classroom, because that means you no longer feel.  And if you no longer feel, you are no longer being honest.  And once you stop being honest you will never be able to practice forgiveness and that means you will never be free to enjoy your work with students.

But most of all... when you stop feeling... you will no longer able to have compassion or love.  And once that happens... once you can no longer be touched by the pain of the world... once you can’t identify with the great pain in your student’s lives... then you are a lost teacher who will only teach hate... instead of love.

Study the lives of the greatest teachers... Christ... the Buddha... Gandhi... Mother Teresa... and you will see individuals who felt the great pain of the world all the way to the end of their lives.  They were able to be effective teachers because they could listen to the pain and suffering in the lives of their students.

In other words... they could love.

I was recently asked how I continue to stay in room 303 and work with students and be successful teaching them.  Without thinking I simply said, “I love them!”  The administrator who asked me was stunned.  I think he thought I was going to give some kind of complex answer... saying you love students is so simple that it risks sounding disingenuous.

But as I have tried to show in the above sections, I often use common words in uncommon ways.  This is especially true when I use the word love.  Remember that great essay by E.M. Forester called Tolerance, where he argued that following the terrible world war, what the world needed was not love but tolerance?  Those of you who know that essay will say that my use of the word love should really be the world tolerance.  While those of you who know the Buddhist or Hindu teaching of compassion will recognize those overtones.

First off when I use the word love I don’t mean some warm fuzzy feeling towards my students. I know teachers who have left the classroom because they didn’t feel that kind of warm fuzzy feeling towards their students and so they assumed they were failures as teachers... not cut out for this kind of work.

In fact when I use the word love I’m not talking about a feeling at all.  I find feelings a very important part of what I do in room 303... but I don’t really have much time to give to feelings when I’m talking about love.

When I use the word love I am talking about a certain perspective or attitude that I hold towards others and myself.  The classic statement of love is to recognize all other creatures in yourself and yourself in all other creatures.  When I speak of love I mean a certain kind of compassion that seeks to accept all others with genuine inclusivity... where I never consider myself spiritually superior.

How do I accomplish this goal?  These principles are symphonic.  Until I am honest enough to admit my own mortality I can never forgive myself for all my mistakes.  Likewise I can’t really forgive others until I see that they too... like me... are subject to a death that will render them also forgotten.  If I can ever get to this moment of insight then I can finally be free to live without shame of the past and fear of the future.  In that present moment I can actually be free to pursue a conscious endeavor.

Teaching is that conscious endeavor for me.  But that endeavor, by its very definition, involves others.  I had to learn how to look at myself as a teacher before I could start to really look at my students.  Once I accepted that there really are four of me... those four quadrants I mentioned above, then I could also start to see my students as not one... but four as well.

So for example I have a tendency to look at my students and myself from the physical perspective...that is to say what I can see.  No doubt it’s maybe more easy, but in the end that is only a small part of who and what I am.  I am my body no doubt, and a student is his or her chemistry... his or her DNA.  But that’s not everything about the student or me.  We both have thoughts and feelings, as well as a worldview that unless we have been conscious about adopting it, we probably are being influenced by that worldview in ways unknown.

This is what I mean when I say that I want to accept all others with genuine inclusivity, never thinking of myself as spiritually superior.  When I learned how to see myself as not one but at least 4 quadrants, then I could start to see my students this way.  In that moment of recognition, I realized that I was actually practicing compassion.  This moment of awareness can only really happen in the present moment and in that act of full acceptance of both myself and my student... then I am doing this thing I will call love.

There is no warm fuzzy feeling necessarily associated with this recognition.  In fact I can have this recognition as I look at a student who I really don’t ‘like’ very much at all!  No kidding!

You know that great idea from the Godfather films... “It’s not personal... it’s business.”  That’s kind of how I think about teaching and the way I relate to my students.  When a student enters 303 and throws her books down and screams about how she hates this f@#$ing school, I immediately have a choice about how I will view this student and her act.  Her body has made the comment but the comment is really a product of an inner life... maybe confused or upset and a cultural worldview she has inherited virtually unaware.  At the same time I have to be aware that the same must be said about me.

What I’m suggesting is that in this moment when this student enters my room and screams this inappropriate thought I want to work real hard to identify with the student by first remembering who and what I am.  Then I can help first myself and then the student to address the issues she clearly wants to talk about.  Asking her to sit down and shut up might not be what is called for.  It might be that in the end I will find that I have to agree with her assessment of our school, but I will have to help her realize that often in life we are placed in situations that are unfair and we have to make the best of them.

I believe that the energy of the universe is so easy to speak of but impossible to understand.  The mystery of the classroom is the same way.  Any teacher who has been in a dynamic and working classroom where great energy was present and learning was taking place will agree with me that there’s not really an easy to way explain to the outsider WHAT is actually happening in the room.

I love this mystery of the classroom.  It’s actually one of the reasons I continue to stay in room 303.  I’m not saying that I experience this kind of mystic recognition every day, but I am saying that I experience enough love through the course of my week to remind me this is what I was born to do.  And in those wonderful moments I am transported outside of my poor insignificant life and myself and I enjoy the breath of the universe...  to speak in religious language... I see the face of God.

Of course this experience... as the experience of love always is in the end... is some experience that seems to transcend language of any kind.  This fact is one of the reasons why it has been so hard for me to write this essay.  I am working now with language, and words crack and splinter when I try to describe the experience that any great teacher knows instantly as true and real.

So I will leave this section with these few words.  But I will say that it’s in these moments of recognition... these moments of love... where I know that true learning is taking place... a learning that is mutual between me and my students.  I love them for the opportunity of such a moment of recognition, and I can feel that they also appreciate the chance to have recognized something amazing and great in themselves, in their colleagues and in their very world.

In that moment somehow everything seems right with the world... there is a balance between all the pain and all the joy of the world... in other words... there is a certain recognition of justice!

Love/Compassion: