I was recently given a definition of a teacher that I really like. A teacher is someone who conducts his education in public.
For many years I talked about my personal life in class and I always wondered -- am I doing the right thing? Shouldn’t this be private material? How am I educating my class if I am telling them about my private life?
A teacher is someone who conducts his education in public. Whenever I talked about my private life I was trying to tell my class what I learned--what these experiences taught me. I was telling them about a crazy person who was my next door neighbor in New York City and all the strange things that happened. But a great deal of my story was about how the crazy person did not appear crazy to most people. How the authorities did not recognize him as crazy, about how much trouble I had convincing people that indeed, this person was crazy. The story had a tragic ending. He committed suicide--and in part this was because the authorities did not pay proper attention. I was conducting my education in public.
For many, many years I have told my classes a long and horrific story about the kidnapping of my niece. At first I told the story because I had to -- every person who goes through a traumatic experience has a deep need to explain, to hold forth, to tell his story. But my story had a point -- had many points. I was trying to tell my students that they should not rely on others -- not on the police or the FBI. They must get involved; they must act. Others never know as much about your situation as you do. I was trying to tell my students that though the New York City police were well meaning, they were not deeply involved in the case--too much else was on their mind. I was trying to tell my students that adults who are supposedly “in charge” are often not doing their job any better than they, my students were. My students didn’t always hand in their assignments on time. The FBI, the New York City police, The Vermont State Police, did not always do their assignments on time. I learned that when I dealt with these authorities -- and I was passing on what I learned to my students.
A teacher is one who conducts his education in public.
Many years later students would come back to me and tell me they remembered the stories I told them -- about my families escape from German occupied territory, about the kidnapping of my niece. I felt bad when they told me this. I thought -- they don’t remember the rules of writing I taught them; they don’t remember the essays I assigned. They remember my stories.
Now I feel better about what they remember. It is not just the stories they remember -- they remember the morals embedded in the stories -- they remember what the stories taught me -- because I conducted my education in public -- and they were educated.
We never know what is good teaching and what is bad teaching. Often what we think is tangential is really essential. Yes, I taught them a subject, but I taught much else because year after year I conducted my education in public: I told them what I was learning as I was learning it.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein