If Nobody Ever Calls You Al, What You Might Do as a Second Rate Teacher

If you cannot be the best, if nobody is ever going to call you Al, then there is another way. It is not a bad way and there are bad ways, but it is a lesser way. If you can be the best, be the best, but if you cannot, then here is what you can do. But before we admit that we cannot take the high road, we must stop and refuse to take the road to hell, the path nobody should take, paved with the good intentions of those who would do evil that good may come.

Recall at all costs this truth: the tyrant, the guru in the classroom, has no virtue. The tyrant has an end in mind, yet even a good end forced on a student by trickery or rhetoric is foul. It makes the dialectic false. Imagine loving a person and seeking her, but lying and manipulating only to win and gain her “love.” There is no love there, no goodness, just beauty twisted, ruined, spoilt, and made ugly.

Where there is deceit, there is no education. Where there is compulsion, there is no love.

To be Al, the best dialectical teacher, is hard and beyond most of us. Sometimes we must take the lesser road, still a good road, because of our limitations, but often it is because of limits from the outside. We do not have the time we need. Students are constrained (God save us!) by the economy or the culture from deep learning. Good teachers do the best they can. Sometimes we cannot be Al, because nobody will give us the space to be the teacher we should be.

The best teacher knows the text deeply, has all the time there is, and refuses any compromise. There is a lower way, one that refuses to be the guru, refuses to manipulate a session, but also lives in limits. The administrators have limited the budget or the message. God grant us the ability to see the truth of ourselves, mostly we take the lower way because it is the best we can do.

I am blessed with a Board that has allowed us to build a real college and school. The limits, for the first time in my life, are my own and whatever the students have brought from the culture. This is a joy, but it also lets me recognize that my limits are my limits. They have never been anybody’s fault.

The “lower way” is teaching with technique. The text is not quite trusted to do the job alone, because the teacher lacks the faith that the deepest scholar has in the book. I am a man of the lesser way.

What do I do?

I begin with a question. The question is the most important part of the class. A good question is authentic: the topic is alive to students and to me. A better question is open ended, there is no obvious answer, but it is not so vague that it could not be answered. Finally, a good question is relevant. Most of all the question is relevant to the text and secondarily to the student and the tutor. We will be changed by the answer, because we want the the truth and dare to believe that a great text with a great discussion can show us some truth.

Sometimes the question works and nothing else is needed. The text and the students do most of the work. In that case, hurrah! You can relax and wait until the end of of class. Yet sometimes the best question is the wrong question for that group of students and nothing sparks . . . and so I bring about ten questions with me. I try again.

That fails at times.

Then one does what one can. Listen. Look and hear what students are saying and let the text shape a question based on what they are saying and not what you think. Form a new question based on this need.

Here is a warning. People will think that I am saying to find a felt need and build on it. That is the way of the tyrant or guru. No. No. Again no. The text will find a deeper need than we need if it is great book. How could this be? We, mostly, do not know ourselves. Great books help us do that basic task and better help us to know the Good, Truth, and Beauty.

Instead, find the question that comes from the text and not from any individual. The needs are particular to individuals, but the text is common to the class. As a result, one can find a common question based on our common ignorance of the text. If the book is a great one, I have discovered that this common question may not deal with our felt needs, but will deal with our real need!

Finally, the class will end with an attempt to pull it all together. How then should we live? What comes of this? I hate discussion that is mindless edutainment or worse, pompous smart person chatter to prove our social status. A good discussion risks change: I will live based on what we have learned, whatever it is.

God help me, but this lower way is a good way. It is the way I must go and though the better teachers may get there first, we will get there in the end if we reject tyranny and trust the dialectic!