Not many of you
should become teachers, my fellow believers,
because you know
that we who teach will be judged more strictly.
James 3:1
“In every class I
teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the
subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know
and trust my selfhood
– and am willing
to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning.”
Parker
Palmer, The Courage To Teach
Like yesterday I remember their faces, all eager and
expectant as I stand before them with nothing but a Thai Bible I cannot
read. It is my first visit to Hot
Springs, and I am learning everything. If I have a teacher-self, she has abandoned me
for the far away safety of Canada to hide with my well-established roles and my
love of word-crafting and a well-laid scope and sequence. But Ahjahn Suradet has unexpectedly asked me
to ‘encourage the children’, here at the end of our singing.
So here I stand, a teacher undone.
Fast-forward.
Of the legion of lessons I am learning in these past months of rigorous reflection, a solid one
is this: stepping away from a role and
title provides an important opportunity to reflect on who I am rather than what I do (or have done, as the case may be).
This has been both deeply affirming and properly
petrifying.
Take the teaching/preaching thing for example.
In these weeks
(has it only been weeks?) since leaving my pastoral position I have been student-engrossed
in academic readings towards a Christian Education credit required for my
degree. My focus is cross cultural
teaching, and I am of course hoping to gain insights that will help me hone
these skills so that I can continue to move past that terrifying moment I
remember so well, and be more and more effective in my work in Thailand.
As I read, I resonate.
Parker Palmer in The Courage To
Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, draws me deep
into identity.
“As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with
students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the
tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the
heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart – and the more one loves
teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be.
The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those
very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that
teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that
learning, and living, require.” Palmer,
11-12
Yes! I get
this. The whole “opening the heart” and
“breaking the heart” thing. This whole
‘teaching thing’ seems a part of me somehow.
For one thing, I’ve been doing it forever. Since I was sixteen and sat around a wooden
table with five six year olds in the grade one Sunday School class of my home
church in Scarborough. Through various
volunteer positions, both inside and outside the church, our years as a
homeschooling family, speaking engagements for workshops and conferences, and
of course most intensively as a pastor delivering weekly sermons. In these later years at Hot Springs, teaching
ESL and Bible lessons to the kids daily, and preaching at the church on Sundays
has become a regular part of my ministry there.
Somehow teaching something to someone somewhere has been part of my
story, part of my heart.
And right now, in this space of transition, this letting
go of many things, I would be honest and say that it’s hard to overstate how
acutely I miss the life and energy of the preaching part of what I used to
do. Also, as I prepare both sermons and
ESL/Bible lessons for my upcoming trip to Hot Springs, I recognize how much
life and energy this gives me.
And equally it
terrifies me.
What an audacious thing, really, to believe I have anything
at all to offer someone else. As
if. Like that first moment before the children at
Hot Springs, who am I that I might have anything to bring to their
understanding, their spiritual formation, their lives?
In another text for this Christian Education credit, Gary
Parrett speaks specifically of the unfortunately common tendency in cross
cultural teaching situations for Western people to assume a superior attitude
toward those they teach, offering a solution.
“We may come to
understand our cultural selves better through assuming the roles of active
learners, the ones being served by others.
As one who is regular in the position of leader, teacher, minister,
servant of others, I have become aware of a tendency to have feelings of
condescension toward others. Certainly,
this is at least unconsciously
strengthened by the fact that I am white, male, and American. To address this – an attitude that I believe
to be not only arrogant but plainly sinful – I have sought to be the learner,
the one receiving service, instruction, or other forms of grace from another,
especially from someone who is unlike me in terms of ethnicity, nationality,
gender, life experience, educational background, theological perspective, or in
other significant ways.”
Parrett, 133
It’s been ten years since that first petrified
moment. I am more confident now. In fact I have two sermons and ten Bible
lessons on the miracles of Jesus prepared and ready to humbly offer if needed when
I’m there later this month. But I’m
still in some ways terrified.
And I’m glad for that.
Being properly petrified keeps me properly humble.
I want to learn.
I want to listen.
To God.
To those who teach me and those I teach,
these being one and the same.
“Teaching engages
my soul as much as any work I know.”
Parker Palmer
Sources:
Conde-Frazer, Elizabeth, & S. Steve Kang, and Gary A.
Parrett, A Many Coloured Kingdom:
Multicultural
Dynamics for Spiritual Formation,
Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004.
Palmer, Parker J. The
Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, San
Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2017.
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