What is most important

When I talk to one of our students, I often imagine hundreds of children behind the student’s back, looking at me from some distance, expectantly. These are children our students will teach. An elementary teacher gets to know and teach 25 students a year, a secondary one – up to 150 and more; let average to 75. Over a 20 years career, she or he will have taught 1500 kids. Our School graduates about 500 teachers a year, which means we potentially affect 750,000 children in one year, or 7.5 million in 10 years. OK, not all of them will make it 20 years, so divide it in half, still a huge number. I am a cynical, and an unsentimental guy, but this is awesome. Just imagine once in a while all these hundreds of faces behind your students’ backs, waiting. What they all need is really the bottom line of what we do, not state standards, not laws and not educational fads. They are our main constituency, not that I presume to know what they need.

If you think about what we do in this light, priorities will change. For example, I am less worried that we may fail to provide a specific skill or a knowledge item to our graduates. What I worry about is that some the negative experiences our graduate received here reverberates throughout the years and all those kids. I also worry that we let thorough a mean or incompetent person who will ruin school for many children. We can multiply bad karma really fast. Of course, the opposite is also true: whatever good lessons our students have learned here may multiply and affect thousands of other lives, indirectly, but quite tangibly. And again, it is not about how much algebra the kids are going to learn, but the experience of a relationship with an adult who is willing to lend her powers to others, to help, to listen, and just to be there. So, if we are successful, we can produce a lot of good karma really fast, if there is such a thing.

It is all about relationships, not so much about technical competencies. As Nikolay, my Russian teacher friend once told me, relationships spread like waves on water surface: if teachers treat each other with dignity and respect, they create a pattern that then spreads into kids’ peer culture in wider and wider circles. And when they treat each other badly, the bad patterns spread just as easily. In teacher education, we are at the center of an incredibly large circle: whatever our students see and experience here is going to repeat again and again in many places.

There is a story by Rabbi Jack Riemer’s "The Rabbi's Gift" (although the authorship is unclear; the story appears in M.S. Peck. The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; 1987:13-15. It was retold so many times, it became a folklore phenomenon). In the story, a rabbi tells an abbot of a dying monastery: “One of you is the Messiah.” The monks then started to treat each other with greates respect, just in case on of them indeed was a Messiah. Here is what happened next:

“Because the monastery was situated in a beautiful forest, it so happened that people occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate. And as they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed this aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling, about it. Hardly knowing why, people began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.

Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another. And another. And it happened, that within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi's gift, a vibrant center of light and spirit." (Cited on Tufts Hillel website)

OK, this is a cheesy story, and a bit of a cliche, but there is some very good reasoning behind it. Between Nikolay and the rabbi Jack Riemer, it is clear to me that we need to take good care of our own community, and treat each other with respect and dignity. Perhaps this is the most important task we can do, because this will spread through our students to their students, and to their children. We should do it not for any moral or religious convictions, but just because of the place we occupy in the world.

I don’t want to oversell our influence: the wider the circle of waves, the less influential is the center. Many other forces shape our graduates, including family, mass culture, and, most powerfully, their own K-12 experiences. Most teachers teach in about the same way they were taught. This is the very basic mechanism of cultural reproduction in place. However, the narrow window of opportunity to change how schools operate belongs with us. If we take care teaching them well, treating them with respect, good things will happen on their own.