On Not Going Gentle

Authentic teaching is a vocation.  It is a calling.

George Steiner, Lessons of the Masters, 16

I have no idea how to express what I feel as I plan to leave the school where I have taught for nearly a quarter century, the vast majority of my thirty-year career.  There is no one I can ask to advise me on how to put these feelings into words.  I could sooner get an answer to Rodgers's and Hammerstein's seemingly whimsical question, "How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?"  Then again, there is Pascal.  "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point," (Pensées, 423/277).  "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of."  And so, while Prufrock may have wondered whether to eat a peach, I will not inquire how to convey emotion verbally.  There is no Lucretian swerve powerful enough to combine the alphabetic atoms into prose or poetry worthy of the task.  Instead, let us consider why there should be such profound emotion connected with something as simple as retirement.

For thirty years I have taught Latin at either the middle school, high school, or undergraduate level.  The most recent twenty-three have been at North Central High School in Indianapolis, Indiana.  Brilliant colleagues with whom I conversed regularly about philosophy, art, language, science, world affairs, and politics made it a scholar's dream, yet it was the students, the insightful, intellectually curious, creative, and boundlessly energetic students who made this so much more than a mere job, and therein lies the first clue to why so much emotion has been caught up in my leaving.

"Authentic teaching is a vocation.  It is a calling."  This observation from George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters, which is perhaps my favorite sustained treatise on education, starts us in the right direction.  There are many forgeries in education, just as there are in any area of life.  The cheap knockoffs display the trappings of teaching but are driven by formulas and fads and are given value only by inept instruments of testing.  These are not our concern here.  Our interest is in authentic teaching, and of this Steiner goes on to say, "The teacher is aware of the magnitude and, if you will, mystery of his profession, of that which he has professed in an unspoken Hippocratic oath.  He has taken vows," (p. 17).

There is a religious cast to this, seen in words like "mystery," "oath," and "vows," and this is right.  Matters of faith and religion connect the human with the transcendent, and a teacher, no less than a priest, is a pontiff, which, as the Latin root pontifex reveals, is a bridge builder.  Teachers help to connect students with ideas, with others, with themselves, and at times even with what lies beyond it all.  How could a teacher not be aware of the magnitude of the profession, another word with religious undertones?  Such work is sacred work, and just as one does not loudly and vulgarly stampede from a cathedral, one does not simply walk away from the place and people with whom he has engaged in such work.

I was stunned at the beginning of my career, as I am now, that I am paid to do what I do, and although I certainly support higher salaries for teachers, there is something a bit odd about being paid at all.  Steiner asks, "How can vocation be put on a payroll?  How is it possible to price revelation?  Why have I been remunerated, given money, for what is my oxygen and raison d'être?  By what oversight or vulgarization should I have been paid to become what I am?" (p. 19).

Stay with this for a moment.  Yes, teachers must live and maintain a living, but when you consider the magnitude and mystery of what is really taking place when one teaches and another learns, does that truly seem something about which you can establish a monetary value?

Some will say that both Steiner and I are getting a bit above ourselves.  After all, what we call teaching covers some rather mundane things, like teaching a child the alphabet or basic math facts, but I would counter that the authentic teacher never merely teaches discrete pieces of knowledge.  As Steiner puts it, "The choice...is between 'life' and the disinterested...pursuit of pure thought," (p. 70).

Now we are getting somewhere.  This is all about life.  Education is a distinctly, indeed supremely, human endeavor.  It is a shared journey of discovery.  This is why Steiner can say that teaching is his "oxygen and raison d'être," as it has been mine.  These students and I, we are all fearfully and wonderfully made, and even in discussing the most simple or trivial of points, it is we, we human beings, who are doing the discussing.  I should confess here that I would have been a failure as an administrator.  Administrators are required by local statutes and state laws to evaluate teachers and students by criteria that, if not entirely meaningless, have less meaning for me.  Yes, of course, students must leave a class knowing certain things, but the true evaluation of what has taken place in that class, which is to say the measure of the value that comes out of it, is life.  Has what transpired, i.e. been breathed across, in the classroom given birth to or fostered the growth of life?  And how would one know if it had?  Ask yourself how you determine the life in anything.  You see signs of it.  In the life-bringing, life-giving classroom, you will find love, joy, happiness, curiosity, smiles, laughter, and the desire to discover and create.  Such things do not fit well in a spreadsheet, and once again we are back to the manual capture of moonbeams.

In the annals of those teachers who have breathed forth life in and with their students, we typically recall the great figures of history or a dear teacher of our own.  Rarely do we look to mythology and literature, and this is a sad consequence of how so much of our literature is taught today.  We mine it for rhetorical features and agendas and ignore the role that story has always played, to teach and to edify, to warn and to model.  Yet Steiner, for whom almost no literature was unfamiliar, finds the exemplary teacher in the centaur Chiron.  "Half beast, half man, Chiron embodies wisdom when it is energy, the natural order when it branches, in dangerous beauty, into the human.  He is the 'noble Pedagogue' par excellence.  His pupils form a constellation like no other:  Chiron has taught Orpheus, Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules, Asclepius, begetter of medicine.  He has borne the child Achilles on his back.  Chiron has educated 'for its glory a Heldenvolk,' 'a nation of heroes.'  What scholastic 'Magnificence' can be set beside the Centaur's?" (p. 72).

Have you ever thought of teaching as the natural order branching in dangerous beauty into the human?  Such a view sees teaching as far more than instructional strategies.  Once again we see life.  There it is in nature and branching, which, as opposed to mere static branches, suggests growth.

Steiner cites the following as a creed of 19th century French philosopher and teacher Jules Lagneau.  [T]he only thing which can be fruitful is a living instruction, a teaching by and of the entire soul, of the whole person, of life," (p. 105).

Given that, can you wonder that my departure from such a long period of teaching among a particular group of people should cause me sorrow?  Yet, it is time.  I am retiring from North Central High School.  Another will teach Latin here and, hopefully, strive to attain to some of the vision of teaching that Steiner describes.  That teacher will succeed in some areas and will fail in others, just as I have, but as Robert Browning reminds us, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?"