Coupled with my lifelong desire to become a lawyer, has always been a passion for teaching as well. Every place I’ve lived, from New York to Accra, Ghana, I have found myself working or volunteering in a teaching capacity; life had a way of drawing me to the profession. Despite this pull, I never really took much thought to actually becoming a teacher. Instead I quickly dismissed the idea and remained focus on becoming a civil rights lawyer. But when my legal career failed to be the fantasy I had concocted in my head, I decided to tune my stubborn ear to listen to what my life was telling me all along. As a result, I now have the good fortune of being an adjunct professor at a local HBCU teaching a religious studies course comparing the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
Teaching is wonderful, but I must confess that it too was very romanticized in my mind (are you detecting a theme?). I think I watched the movie the Great Debaters one too many times. I imagined I would stand on a chair, sprout words of wisdom, and stimulate young minds to engage in critical thinking and action. What actually occurred, however, is that my very suburban upbringing and education was met with quite the challenge. My fantasy quickly was converted into reality as I realized that teaching is as much about learning from my students as it is about imparting knowledge. And these lessons I have learned are often surprising when they emerge and sometimes quite troubling.
For instance, each class I like to begin with an opening meditation where I allow one student to lead the class in some meditative exercise for the first few minutes. Sometimes this goes beautifully, other times…not so much. One opening meditation in particular started in the “not so much” category, but quickly turned profound when my student started to share his story. He began by declaring that you cannot trust anyone, and then explained how his friends and loved ones were murdered by trusted confidants who betrayed them. At only nineteen years old he has experienced the murder of at least five people close to him. I am thirty years old and have had the terrible experience of losing one family member, and that was traumatic enough. How do you lose multiple friends and loved one before the age of twenty?!
I wish I could say that everyone in the class was appalled or saddened by this story, but unfortunately that was not the case. No one really seemed disturbed. The truth was, his story wasn’t shocking to them because it was all too familiar. In that moment I had an epiphany. I had been so focused on simply imparting knowledge that I forgot to ask the more important questions: Who cares about Abraham, Isaac or Jacob when your loved ones are dying? How do you expect one to get intrigued by monasticism when escaping their environment is beyond their reach? In other words, how do you get someone to care about a course that on some level seems irrelevant to him or her?
I understood then that I must bring this material down from the figurative (and not so figurative) clouds and contextualize it. A saying that kept coming to my mind that day states, “People must know that you care before they care what you know.” In the context of my classroom, that meant my students must feel assured that I understand them before they are truly open for me to impart knowledge. Only in understanding them can I contextualize the material and make it relevant to their lives. The core of teaching, therefore, is relationship, and that must be cultivated. To be sure, this is nothing new, but in that moment I recognized how much I was lacking on the relational part of teaching. The depth of my ignorance concerning my students’ diverse backgrounds was revealed and I realized I needed to alter my approach. And alter it I did.
But it is “not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal…[yet] I press toward the mark.” Although my classroom fantasies are gone, they have only been replaced with stronger and more empowering goals, not just for me, but for my students as well. Teaching creates a sacred space where an exchange between professor and student happens, but only if it’s undergirded by relationship. I am grateful for those moments of exchange between my students and me, and eagerly await that next one.
–Until Next Time–
Palooke
