⁴ The Lord Jehovah hath given me the tongue of them that are taught,

that I may know how to sustain with words him that is weary:

he wakeneth morning by morning,

he wakeneth mine ear to hear as they that are taught. (Isaiah 50:4)

There is no teaching unless there is learning, and the deepest learning comes by teaching.  This has become my motto in forty years of teaching high school and college.  Honestly I didn’t truly understand it till I taught college, but it is equally true at every grade level. I first experienced it in the fifth grade.

We were having a class discussion in about sheep-herding in Scotland. Why do I remember this? It is because I was teaching as well as learning. Mr. Glaser, my teacher, asked, “Why were sheep the best animals for industry in this contry?” or words to that effect. I raised my hand, as I seldom did in those days.

“Because they’re adapted to the ways of the land.”  Mr. Glaser paused a beat and said, “What did you say?”

Hoping I was on the right track, I repeated, “They’re adapted to the ways of the land.”

“‘Adapted to the ways of the land,'” he mused. In the next moment he said, “Where can I find a piece of paper? I want to write that down. I want someone to know one of my students said that.” Whoa! Can you see why this memory is burned into my brain for the last fifty-five years? I was suddenly the teacher in a fifth grade class, and I would always know why sheep and wool were Scotland’s most prosperous industry.

After teaching for a few years myself, I began to realize how Mr. Glaser had taught me indelibly. I wasn’t the most brilliant student in his class, I was just the most reserved, but he had made me feel brilliant by turning me into the teacher. Much of what I consider permanent learning began with the role reversal of the student becoming the teacher. Sometimes it comes with a sleight of hand, and sometimes the teacher is transparently amazed by what his student says or writes.

Many of my male teachers probably captured my attention by pretending I taught them something.  “I never thought of it that way,” they might tell me, and I would never know whether they really didn’t or just wanted me to think so. By thrusting me into the role of the teacher they lifted my awareness and my confidence to another plane.  I felt enormously alert and receptive, an ideal state of mind.  It was a moment when teaching and learning were almost indistinguishable.

Although learning takes many forms, some of them fleeting or incidental, learning that excavates a place in the memory seems to matter. It is not only what is remembered, but how it is remembered.  It may be a milestone that records a developmental phase or the arrival on a plateau of understanding, but it is unforgettable.

Great teachers have always been portrayed as fonts of wisdom overflowing to their students, but when we listen to them carefully, we hear them encouraging us to learn as they do. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Luke 17:17).  Children typically are quick to move from learner to teacher and back again without even noticing. During the first six years of their lives when they are learning language, they are taking in words and grammar and experimenting with them at dizzying pace.  It was this kind of awareness and growth that Jesus prized in his disciples, a sense of wonder in what we learn and a sense of humility in what we don’t yet know.

Jesus kept this sense of wonder as he taught.  He was often surprised by the outsiders, those who were not raised as Jews.  When the Roman centurion said famously, “Just say the word and my servant will be healed,” Jesus was said to be “astonished.” “I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matt 8:10).

Once Jesus showed uncharacteristic frustration with a Canaanite woman who relentlessly followed him, pleading for the healing of her daughter. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs” he chastened her (Matt 15:26).

But she parried his figure of speech with her own,” . . . but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (27).

Realizing he had been out-maneuvered by a determined mother, he responded, “Woman, you have great faith. Your request is granted” (28).  This surprising exchange shows Jesus becoming the student and being taught by an unlikely teacher.  The Canaanite woman had no status, being female and Gentile.  How would she presume to teach the great rabbi of the day?  Perhaps Jesus broke his own stereotypes to hear wisdom from such a source.  The anecdote shows how Jesus learned by submitting to wisdom from wherever it came.

One of the great parables about teaching and learning is the Parable of the Sower.  It concludes with the best conditions of teaching and learning: “But what was sown on the good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it. He produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown”(Matt 13:23).  We can learn much about learning from this conclusion.