LIFE LESSONS

Teaching provides the ideal way for an adult to measure his or her own growth as a human being. It’s important to remember that learning is a process that involves, at the same time, both the students and their teachers. In a real sense, the classroom is a laboratory in which over a period of time you get to measure your own growth as a person  as well as that of your students. “Am I patient enough? How well do I control my temper? Do I become too defensive at times?” These are just a few of the questions that teachers have a chance to ask themselves every single day of the school year.

One  of the  first things  you learn  is that young people know how to push all the right buttons. (Or is it the wrong buttons?) In fact, students are as quick to expose the weak spots in a teacher’s defenses as the Trojans were adept at piercing the heel of Achilles with their arrows. That’s just an old English teacher’s way of saying that students constantly provide their teachers with grist for the mill for the unfolding of their own personal growth. 

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Might this be an area in which the literature can play an important role for the teachers as well as the students?

Yes. The books that we read with our students can also serve as a barometer to measure the personal growth of the teacher. When I was a teenager, Catcher in the Rye was clearly my favorite book, the first novel I ever read in which I felt that the author was speaking directly to me in my own language. “You’re right, Holden!” I wanted to shout. “There are too many phonies  in  the  world!”  But  over time  I found myself looking at  Holden  in an  entirely different  light.  When  I reread the novel  with my students many years later, the literary character whom I had so admired as a teenager had been transformed into a  self-absorbed  preppie  misfit unable to see beyond his own narcissistic vision  of the world.  Now all I felt like saying was, “Grow up, Holden!  Get a life!” It was obvious that over the years one of us had clearly evolved in our way of looking at the real world.

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That sounds like a good reason  for a person to reread some of the same books over the course of a lifetime. It’s like the before and after, first viewing the world through the eyes of a child and then revisiting it years later from the perspective of an adult.

Teachers  need  to be willing to take an honest look at themselves. After all, nobody’s perfect. For one thing, they need to be truthful about the ways in which they deal with their anger. Do I let it build up until  it  explodes  in  a  single   outburst?  Or  do  I express my feelings  of anger  as they occur along the way?  It’s not   a  question   of  having   to  rush   out  and   see  a shrink, either. (Although that can be helpful, too!) The point is that the more we know about our own selves, the more insight we are able to provide into the lives of our students in order to assist them in their growth as human beings. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, once said, “If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether  it  is   something  that  could  better  be changed  in ourselves.”