teaching

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Meeting Jesus, the Great Teacher

In Freeing Jesus, Diana Butler Bass says that Jesus grows in us as we age, not that Jesus himself is variable, but we discover his depth at different stages of our lives, times when Jesus meets us, speaking to our particular needs. I can see that progression in my own life: when I saw Jesus as the only the Son of God, as the Question Answerer, as the fire within us, as an absent betrayer, and as a brilliant teacher. There may be more, but this is what I see this morning.

Today, who is Jesus the Teacher?

At the Tony Awards (2015),  famous performers cited a favorite acting teacher for lifting them toward eventual stardom. Rarely do we hear teachers say, “I made her what she is today.” Yet we hear it from students all the time.

For some reason students are glad to give teachers credit for identity or character formation. If it weren’t so immune to measurement or controlled experiments, we might believe that teaching is more about compassion and example than test score elevation. A classroom:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah, and still other Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?”he asked. “Who do you say that I am?
Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
(Matthew 16: 13-18)

Jesus was concerned with unleashing the potential of his followers. He planned a short stay on this planet, and he needed disciples who would seamlessly take up his work after he left. In the verses above he contrived an unstandardized test to measure the readiness of his disciples.
1) Who do people say the Son of Man is?
2) Who do you say that I am?
The first question has several answers, more in the way of reporting than solving a problem. “Who do people say that I am?” ranged everywhere from “John the Baptist” to “Jeremiah.”
The second question “Who do you say that I am?” is clearly the summative measure of their progress, and Peter, the star pupil, steps into the breach with the best answer “the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

The next move is where the teaching really begins, even as the learning curve often rises in the post-mortem of a test, more than from the test itself. Why do these questions even matter?
Jesus’s first lesson is “this was revealed . . . by my father in heaven.” You get your best answers from God, not man. You learn by listening to God, not those who speculate that Jesus was Elijah come back from the dead.

The next move is lending perspective to what has just happened. Another thing you can’t readily assess: the pupil graduating to a new identity. First, Jesus addresses him as “Simon,” then as “Peter” signifying his growth and potential for growth. And then prophetically, “On this rock I will build my church.”

In my latter years of teaching teachers, I suddenly began to hear myself say “You’re going to be a great teacher” when a student shared a great insight or experience. And I wished I had made such outrageous predictions much earlier in my career. Because I realize now that students remember those moments better than all the professional wisdom I could impart, and the memory may help them later in their careers.

Why did Peter need to hear that bold prediction from Jesus at that moment? First, he had made himself vulnerable by saying what the other disciples were afraid to utter. They were all thinking it. Only Peter was willing to say it. Second, he was about to see the man he called “the Christ” imprisoned and tortured. The whole dream was dissolving. Third, Peter was going to contribute to Jesus’s humiliation with the three denials, something he swore he would never do. The timing of Jesus’s prediction was crucial, because it would carry Peter through his trial by fire.

With the disciples Jesus was interested in the highest form of teaching: the forming of new identities. As Jesus prayed later, “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.” (John 16:17-19)
All the other stuff, the interpretation of the Law, the parables, the apprenticeship, much of it did not take until Jesus was long gone. The sanctification, the love, the working together, that was crucial right away.

There is a cliche in teaching that we teach the student, not the subject matter. I have found this accurate, not only in high school, but in college, with students aspiring to teach. Students remember who you are and how you teach, not just what you teach. Research shows that education students often imitate their best teachers in the past more than the teacher we try to impose on them in their teacher education. This is good from the point of view of knowing good teaching, but bad from the point of view of developing your own character as a teacher.

In teaching student teachers I finally learned that how I teach and how I treat students is the curriculum students receive more than the research about best practices and new classroom approaches. I began to realize that Jesus’ effectiveness as a teacher came from his daily actions as a compassionate, inclusive and personal teacher that left the most enduring memory on his pupils.

My conversion to Jesus, the teacher, came late in my life. At least half way through my journey.  But it came in the nick of time, when I was trying to teach teachers, who were desperate for my experience as a high school teacher. What they did not know was that I was teaching more and more by example as I learned what the real curriculum was, what they would carry with them into student teaching.

Jesus shows us that character and identity formation are the heart of great teaching. His teaching was not successful because his disciples had a good grasp of the Law and the Prophets or even impressive faith. He was successful because he taught them as individuals, as much as the curriculum of the Good News.. He was successful because they could take up the cross as they had seen him do it: feed the hungry, heal the hurting, encourage the hopeless. They caught the spirit and the intent of his teachings, the part that would stay with them after graduation. And that’s what made this rabbi a Great Teacher.

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Experience Required

On Tuesday this week, the New York Times reported the failure to thrive of African-American boys in American public schools. Policy-makers quietly tore their hair out, trying to get to the bottom of this persistent anomaly in academic performance. On Wednesday the Times reported the appointment of Cathleen Black, a white female publishing executive, with no teaching experience, to the position of Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools.

Race and gender should not be primary qualifications in school administrative appointments, but teaching experience ought to be. Choosing an administrator from outside the field of education shows a fundamental distrust and disrespect for the calling of the teacher.  It sends the message, that began with the appointment of Joel Klein to the same position, that school reform is something done to teachers, not of the teachers, by the teachers and for the teachers.

The best school administrators began their careers in classrooms. This is not a matter of paying your dues, but of walking a mile, or a hundred miles, in the shoes of a teacher.  Classroom teachers understand things that the public critics of education often do not get: that students often bring enormous distractions from their family environment to school; that chronic absenteeism affects the whole school environment as much as the absent student; that the quality of writing, speaking, and listening in a class diminishes in proportion to class size; that test performance has very little to do with actual learning.

All of this can be learned from a few days of studying the research or sitting in a focus group of teachers, but the true impact can only be felt by teaching.  Only a teacher knows the full impact of adding three students to a class of 32 or of subtracting one angry student from a class of 35. Only a teacher knows how implementing a unit plan that extends over four weeks can be subverted by 20 per cent of a class that shows up only half of those days.  Only a teacher understands how disruptive test preparation is for a class that has been developing critical habits of mind over the previous ten weeks. You have to feel the difference. You have to see it in the eyes of the students.

Politicians will see this as romanticizing the teaching profession. To them teaching and learning is no more than production and distribution. School mandates and scripted lessons are the inputs, students and their test scores are the products and distribution is reporting the data. You enrich one side of the equation and the other side naturally increases.  I had to smile when I noticed that the Common Core Readiness Standards for writing described the writing process as “production and distribution.” No teacher would have written that as a curriculum goal.

Shelley Harwayne rose to the level of Area Superintendent in New York City without losing her connection to the classroom. Her books about teaching literacy and celebrating student achievement are required reading in teacher preparation classes. No matter how far her work took her from the classroom, she always had the feeling of teaching in her bones. If she had to make tough decisions, teachers could still console themselves she had made them in the context of classroom experience.

The same will not be said about the next Chancellor of the New York Public Schools. Regardless of her skills in negotiation and management, she will not bring the experience of teaching in the classrooms she supervises. She will bring the experience of an elite education and children who attend boarding school. None of this should be held against her, but it diminishes her qualifications to lead a public school system.

It also sends a message to teachers that they will not be heard or trusted for another administration of so-called “school reform.”