When I was student teaching, my cooperating teach gave me a book, The Courage to Teach, by Palker J. Palmer. She inscribed, beautifully:
Mike-
This is a book that always reminds me of what is important in this job. I hope it will do the same for you.
Best of Luck…
With the way life works, the way we get caught up in one thing after another, graduation, then travel, then job-searching, then travel, then teaching middle school, then making zines, then applying to grad school, then this, then that, have to read this, this, this, that, that that — The book stayed on my bookshelf until this afternoon. Last week, Sarah B recommended the book to me as we discussed ideas for my thesis.
I’m only a few pages in, and I’m right with Palmer: “When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life — and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject — not at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning. I will know it only abstractly, from a distance, a congeries of concepts as far removed from the world as I am from personal truth” (2).
I think it is this eternal quest to know myself that I am embarking.
Palmer notes that in the common discourse on teaching, we focus on, first, “what” is taught, and then, if we go a bit deeper, “how” it is taught, and then further, “why” it is taught. We rarely get to the “who” question: “who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world? How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?” (4).
I like these questions, but my mistrust of institutions leads me to ask, “How can I sustain and deepen my selfhood from which good teaching comes in the atmosphere of an instition that, in Althusser’s word, ‘crushes’ me?”
