July 30, 2020. Today my dad would have turned ninety, and I am starting my thirtieth year in education. Neither of those facts seems possible, which is a common experience as people age. We ask where the time went and how it could have gone so quickly. Where and how, indeed.
I wrote several years ago about the teaching heritage in my family, most of which lies on my mother's side. My dad, too, was an educator, and you can read about his career in that earlier post and in this one in which I described five key "ways of an educator" that I took from him. What strikes me today is how similar things are in my experience compared with that of my dad.
My dad was born in 1930. To say that things are different now is so obvious as to be absurd. He did lead the way in bringing computers to his elementary school in the late '70s and early '80s, but he could not have imagined setting up courses in a learning management system so students can access learning materials at any time and at any place in the world. He certainly could not have dreamed of technology that allows me to look at my computer and see my students in their homes while they are seeing me through their own devices as we engage in discussions together from different locations. Oh, he might have been able to dream of it. He was a fan of the original Star Trek series, after all, but he would never have considered such things to be more than fantasy.
Yet, I would argue that things are much the same for me as they were for my dad. As I have prepared to enter my thirtieth year of teaching Latin, despite feeling as if I were a beginning teacher as I have had to grapple with new technology and more questions than answers, I have done so with my eyes fixed on something beyond the immediate. My students, all born in the 21st century, are still people, and they will come to me as they always have, as they came to my dad and mom when they taught, as indeed they have come to teachers stretching back to Socrates, with their own thoughts and ideas and questions. They will come with curiosity, and I am so eager to share with them treasures of knowledge I long ago discovered and to find new gems along with them.
You see, my dad and I both shared an inclination toward huge smiles and laughter that could be heard several rooms away, and I am sure that the source of such constant joy and joviality was for him as it is for me, life itself, and education is about life. It is about sharing and exploring all that has gone before us in the many fields of knowledge. It is about thinking and creating based on that shared exploration to add to the body of human experience. Human beings have an innate drive toward life, and to be part of that, to sail its strong and mighty currents, cannot help but bring a smile to the face of anyone who does so in the vast, wonderful sea of learning. It brought endless smiles to my dad, and it still brings a smile to me.
