THE COURAGE TO TEACH

PARKER J. PALMER

Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, Jossey-Bass Inc, San Francisco, 1998.

"I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illuminated by the lightning-life of the mind then teaching is the finest work I know.

But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused and I am so powerless to do anything about it that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool I was to imagine that I had mastered this occult art harder to divine than tea leaves and impossible for mortals to do even passably well!

If you are a teacher who never has bad days, or who has them but does not care, this book is not for you. This book is for teachers who have good days and bad, and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts because they love learners, learning, and the teaching life.

When you love your work that much and many teachers do the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in. We must enter, not evade, the tangles of teaching so we can understand them better and negotiate them with more grace, not only to guard our own spirits, but also to serve our students well.

Those tangles have three important sources. The first two are commonplace, but the third and most fundamental is rarely given its due. First, the subjects we teach are as large and complex as life, so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole, and respond to them wisely in the moment, requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve.

If students and subjects accounted for all the complexities of teaching, our standard ways of coping would keep up with our fields as best we can and learn enough techniques to stay ahead of the student psyche. But there is another reason for these complexities: we teach who we are.

Teaching like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less that the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge…and good teaching requires self-knowledge: it is a secret hidden in plain sight.

This book explores the teacher’s inner life, but it also raises a question that goes beyond the solitude of the teacher’s soul: How can the teacher’s selfhood become a legitimate topic in education and in our public dialogues on educational reform?"

... Parker J. Palmer (photo above) was born 1939 in Chicago, Illinois is an author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. Palmer served for fifteen years as Senior Associate of the American Association of Higher Education, and now serves as Senior Advisor to the Fetzer Institute.