On Teaching: "Beautiful and Complete"

I’ve completely changed my mind about what my primary task as a teacher is. For most of my teaching career, I thought my job as a teacher was to make my students more “complete” – to give them skills and knowledge that would make them “better” people. I guess I saw my students as deficient individuals who needed my help to somehow complete them, round them off, put some finishing touches on. They lacked something, and my responsibility was to provide what was lacking. In the last few years, however, I’ve begun to believe that this approach is entirely wrong. My students are not flawed and incomplete, but beautiful and complete – just like the entire universe. At any given moment, everything in the universe is exactly the way it should be, and this includes each of my students. I may not see or understand the beauty and completeness of all things, but it’s there – and it will be there in my classroom today. My task today is not so much to change my young students or improve them, but rather to see them as they are. If I can truly recognize and honor the beauty and completeness of my students today, I will be the best kind of teacher there is. By acknowledging their perfection in this moment, I will enable them to become perfect in a different way in the next moment. I can’t make my students become more brilliant than they already are, but I can help them become brilliant in new and different ways. That’s my job – my duty – as a teacher, and it’s a sacred one, to be sure.