On Teaching: GETTING STRONG THROUGH WEAKNESS

“The weaker I get, the stronger I become.” -- 2 Corinthians 12:10

It’s a strange paradox that the more I feel like a failure as a teacher, the better teacher I become. I’ve seen it happen again and again. When I end a school day feeling like this teaching thing is just too immense, too complex, too mysterious for little, ignorant me, the next day is almost always a day when I do some of my best teaching. I go from total lack of confidence one day to a strange kind of supreme confidence the next. I think what happens is that, by realizing that I can’t possibly, by myself, figure out the complexities of teaching another human being, I become aware, once again, of another, much higher power, that can do this. By getting my self out of the way, I make room for the infinite, all-powerful intelligence (some people call it God) that’s available to all of us. By feeling completely power-less, I enable myself to feel the power-full nature of this measureless and intelligent universe we live in. So I guess I should be thankful for those disastrous days when nothing goes right in my classroom. Those are the days when I am being taught the most important lesson of all – the great truth that I can do nothing by myself. Those bad days remind me that a teacher is like a man sailing a small boat on a day of brisk wind. If he tries to control the wind, to do all the sailing by himself, to literally push and pull his boat across the water, he will inevitably fail. He will inevitably feel weak and incompetent. But that’s precisely when he might, if he is lucky, be able to gets his little, isolated ego out of the way and recognize the immense power – the wind – that’s ready to help him, that’s ready, in fact, to do all the work. That’s when he finds that sailing can be an utterly relaxing sport. I want to understand that the same is true of the wonderful sport of teaching.