Pope Francis, the Person of the Year! That was refreshing on so many levels. A man so transparently devoted to the lowly, the struggling, and the disenfranchised. How much we needed the recognition of  “A Big Heart Open to God.”

Most exciting to me was that his teaching practices echoed his message. The young and inexperienced were valued for their tastes and creativity.  Literature was the way to enrich the thinking of students, not tokens of accomplishment. Writing was for authentic and appreciative audiences, not only for getting a grade and fulfilling an objective. A teacher was a servant, as much as a leader.

In “A Big Heart Open to God” (Antonio Spadero, SJ September 30, 2013) Pope Francis revealed the soul of a teacher dedicated to his students, ready to balance the requirements of the canon with the motivation of adolescent readers. I was absorbed by the interview introducing the mind and heart of the new prelate, but the two paragraphs about “the pope teaching literature to his secondary students” inspired me.

“‘Then, Holy Father, creativity is important for the life of a person?’ I [Spadero] asks. He laughs and replies: ‘For the Jesuit it is extremely important! A Jesuit must be creative.'”

I had heard that Jesuits were supreme philosophers and logicians, but creative? That was new to me.

Faced with task of introducing his class to El Cid, he found it was not a hit. “Then I decided that they would study El Cid at home and that in class I would teach the authors that the boys liked the most.

Of course young people want to read more racy works, like La Casada Infiel or classics like La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas. But by reading these things they acquired a taste in literature, and we went on to other authors. And that was for me a great experience. I completed the program, but in an unstructured way–that is, not ordered according to what we expected in the beginning, but in an order that came naturally by reading these authors.

The curriculum Pope Francis was dealt was totally unfamiliar to me, but I could insert familiar obligations of the secondary curriculum, Great Expectations, Grapes of Wrath, Wuthering Heights,  and I could get his drift. He was not content to “expose” his students to the classics. He wanted them to love reading and talk with authority about novels they read, to have a “taste in literature.” It was teaching not by inoculation, but by assimilation.  He saw the impenetrability of the required texts, and opted to discuss the engaging, inspiring texts in class. He wanted to have literate conversation with this students, not a professorial commentary of what they should have gathered from texts on the margins of their understanding. This from a man who had absolute authority in his classroom.

What about writing? What kinds of essays were assigned? “In the end I decided to send Borges two stories written by my boys. I knew his secretary, who had been my piano teacher. And Borges liked those stories very much. And then he set out to write the introduction to a collection of these writings.”

So much in a few sentences! First, they were writing their own stories, not critical essays. Second, the teacher loved his students’ writing enough to bring it to the attention of an editor acquaintance, who introduced them for publication.  Third, he was proud of his students’ accomplishments. They were the means and the ends, not the artifacts of success.  I remembered sending my own students’ papers about a locally-written novel to the author and how much they appreciated his attention, not all of it laudatory. Students who connect with an audience beyond the classroom are blessed with a real writing experience.

So much in this article about Pope Francis reveals his “big heart,” but nothing was more significant to me than his teaching practices.  He shows a heart open to students. “As much as you have done it for the least of these, you have done it to me.”