Looking Backward

One of my most exciting responsibilities as Dean of Faculty is working with our teaching fellows. The TFs are right out of college and are enjoying a “baptism by fire” into the teaching world. Of course, their baptism by fire is a little less brutal than mine was a quarter century ago. Now that is not just curmudgeonly age talking, you know, saying things like, “I had to walk to school, uphill—both ways!!” but back in those old days when I showed up wet behind the ears at Gaston Day School, I was the entire History Department for the Upper School…I still marvel at that, and marvel at my naivete not to be as frightened of that as I should have been. I had four “preps” every day and five classes and boy was it exhausting and exhilarating. No one ever bothered to give me advice or helpful tips about teaching—it was just straight from the college experience to the full-on teacher experience. And I survived, and loved it.

Our TFs are treated with a little more TLC. The TFs have two classes, mentors galore, and a seminar to support and guide them. It is exciting planning what they should study in order to be as successful as possible. The seminar meets four times a week: one day is set aside to help them plan as purposefully as possible for the week, one day they meet with a mentor who observed a class of theirs the previous week, one day is a seminar where we discuss ideas and strategies and reading related to pedagogy and the teacher persona. The last day is set aside to reflect on the week…what worked and what didn’t work.

We have 6 TFs this year—from such colleges as Georgetown, Swarthmore, Brown, Middlebury, Yale and Williams. Two of them did work here last year in another capacity, so they are not so brand brand-new, but they are all marvelous to work with—smart, enthusiastic, ready, willing and able to make this educational project work.

The other day one of them asked me what message I would give to my own 22 year old self if I could travel back in time…

How interesting…

I had two responses instantly, one perhaps helpful, one perhaps not. On the one hand, I would tell my younger self that while I did not have years of experience, I was resourceful and hardworking and smart enough to be of use in the classroom. I knew what contemporary selective colleges wanted in students. In other words, I was legitimate. On the other hand, I would have to break the bad news: that I knew very little about anything that mattered.

You don’t know what you don’t know when you are young. How could you? People who are older nod sagely and say, “you’ll learn!” You’ll learn about love and investments, about failing and falling down and getting up and betrayal. I remember worrying about wasting time and wondering if I would ever get to an Ivy League university. Sigh. I remember thinking that if I could accomplish that particular goal I would have no problems. I actually thought that! Then I went to an Ivy League university and found it quite wanting.

I remember that 22 year old, thinking that I was getting older as fast as I could, but I couldn’t learn enough, or couldn’t anticipate everything fast enough. It’s a bit of a shame, isn’t it, never quite getting the pace of adulthood down “correctly.” You shouldn’t rush it, but then you want to move as fast into this arena as possible…I suppose it goes back to making bread with my grandmother in childhood, she had it all together as she looked at me with the rising dough and warned gently, “Give it patience, or it turns out wrong.”

It’s nothing short of astonishing all that we learn between the time we are born and the time we die. Most of the learning, of course, takes place in the laboratory of own lives—and strangely, the continuum of learning only seems clear in hindsight. That is precisely why the TFs get that Thursday afternoon of reflection. One of them mentioned to me that he had heard one learns more in the first months of teaching than in over a year of college.

So I give advice—oh, there is so much advice to give to the new teachers. There is advice about where to stand in class, how to stand, how to give back tests, reminding them that in any given class a teacher makes maybe 1000 decisions. Some of the advice they can’t hear because it’s in a different language, a language we learn over time, the language of experience cut with failure, triumph, and tedium.

I suppose I am thinking in just this way because this week I begin directing Our Town here at KA in Jordan. It is 20 years ago exactly that I first directed this plotless wonder at Charlotte Latin with some of the best actors I have ever known (Catherine and Chuck as George and Emily, Mike Coyle and Eric Zion, Lyde and Junko, Kathleen and Megan…ahhh….a sigh for the miracles we made on that stage in the 1990s). It is a play that exhorts us all to think about how we live life. As the play takes a tragic turn in Act III, and examines the end of life, the sage Stage Manager says:

Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take ‘em out and look at ‘em very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for 5,000 years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.

I remember when I did the play in 1992 I really felt I had a good grasp of its message. Then I did the play again in the spring of 2000, and I thought, “Whoa, I didn’t get it all before! Now I think I have a better sense of it!” And then I tackled Act III of the play in the fall of 2006, along with two other works, and I realized, “Every time I come back to this play, I have unveiled a little more of the truth for myself.” I am interested to see what I think of the play now that I have added the Jordanian chapter of my life to it. But the message of seeking out that something eternal, of trying to get a little closer to it resonates with me as I work with these talented, eager young teachers.

There comes that moment when we finally know what matters and, perhaps more important, what doesn’t, when we see that all the life lessons came not from what we had but from who we loved, and from the failures perhaps more than the successes.

I would tell my 22-year old self that what lasts are things that are so ordinary he may not even see them: family dinners, catch-up phone calls with old friends, reunions of singers and buddies, talks with treasured mentors, watching a student understand a concept, feeling the upward trajectory of progress, fair fights, play rehearsals, lingering and savoring. I would also tell him that while we are dreaming, time flies. I loved those years at Gaston Day School, fresh out of college, but I was also rushed to “get on with my life” at that problem-solving Ivy League place.

But of course, the young man I once was cannot hear me, not just because of time and space, but because of the lessons he has yet to learn. It’s a miracle—somehow over time he learned them all just the same, by trial and error.