Friday was the end of 1st Semester, and my grades were all in before the end of the school day. I will begin the week with my students having several days left to complete a mandatory exercise that does not affect their grades but does affect my evaluation before I begin Thursday morning being observed as I begin a series of lessons on the Constitution and the convention that created it.
That might seem to be an interesting point at which to explore our current events which raise so many constitutional issues, but these are 8th graders in a course in US History through the Civil War and Reconstruction, so that is not a major consideration as I plan.
Nor is the fact that this particular school has for me turned out to be a disappointing and difficult setting in which to teach a major impetus to my writing this post, although it certainly contributes to it. The experience of first semester has led me to turn down an opportunity to complete my doctorate in education online in 22 months for only about $11K — in large part because I am seriously wrestling with whether I continue in education, and if I do whether I should try to switch to a non-public setting: in that regard I am attending two job fairs for independent schools on the next two Saturdays, although I recognize that at my age (turning 73 in May) and recent work history (this is my 7th school since I retired in June 2012) makes it quite unlikely I will even be invited for any interviews.
It is the combination of many things that bring me to writing this post at a time when perhaps I should be doing more planning for my teaching. It is certainly the experience of this year and the uncertainty of my future. It is the current state of our politics, including not only the ongoing investigations of Trump and related, but also the nascent nastiness already evident in the expanding Democratic presidential primary field.
It is also fueled by reading two articles that have provoked my thinking. One, by Andrew Sullivan, is the lead article for New York Magazine and explores in detail the crisis faced by the Catholic Church in addressing homosexuality among its clergy, including far too many bishops and cardinals (and probably at least one recent pope) to pretend that there is not a problem. The other appears in Friends Journal, the major Quaker publication in this country, and is titled We Are Not John Woolman and challenges its readers to live up to the standards set by that Quaker luminary, who as a young man decided not to benefit in any way or use any product produced by slave labor or by what he saw as the abuse of animals. I note that Woolman was perhaps the greatest single influencer on the Society of Friends moving away from tolerating its members from owning slaves. It also looks at the work of Lucretia Mott and Benjamin Lay, two other Quakers who put themselves on the line for what they believed to be moral reasons. These three are examined as Quaker models in light of the actions of Colin Kaepernick, with a challenge to readers to examine how they live, speak and act.
I will, below the fold, attempt to explain how all of this comes together in my mind.
I continue to teach in part because I still need an income, in part because I want to make a difference in the world, especially for those who start with fewer advantages in life. I have taught because I am good at it, and not merely in having students learn content, but also in learning skills like critical thinking, writing, working with others, and also helping them grow up. I often frustrate some, challenge others. There are a few things in which I could make as much money as I now do, but those are things like sales that do not engage me morally.
One part of my approach to teaching is an emphasis on integrity and moral compass.
But what if, for any reason, I am finding it hard to maintain integrity in my current setting? What if I am finding it hard to connect my students not merely with the content, but also with the idea of moral compass? What if, heaven forbid, the culture in which I find myself is one in which I find myself dissuaded from the effort needed to maintain these? Is that the fault of the setting, of the students, or must I question my own motivations?
In reading the Sullivan piece, I noted how many times he talked about the unwillingness of the Church to honestly admit realities. Among these are why so many who are gay seek out or are pushed towards the priesthood; how even separate from the abuses that have been committed there are good gay priests, many of who maintain celibacy in order to serve others; how an honest examination of the history of the Catholic Church is that it has NOT always been hostile to homosexuality among the clergy; how many of those who are vocally homophobic may themselves be gay (as was the longtime Cardinal Archbishop of New York Francis Spellman — even as a Jewish teenager I heard the stories and could see much of the behavior) and perhaps fearful of themselves being exposed. The lack of honesty, with themselves and with others including their parishioners, raises the questions of integrity and moral compass. And please note — I am NOT condemning of homosexuality either in orientation or practice, that is NOT the reason why I am including this.
The piece in Friends Journal both provoked some serious self-examination but also invoked a visceral negative reaction, the latter to the author’s beginning the second paragraph by targeting opponents of Nike’ Kaepernick ad with these words:
Many conservatives and “support the troops” types of people...
The use of the quotation marks around those three words really bothered me with an implication that someone who chooses to support the troops openly is somehow insensitive to and/or intolerant of the issues Kaepernick and others were raising.
I thought of George Fox’s admonition that we were to walk gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person we encountered. One is far more likely to heal wounds by addressing the good in the other person insofar as that is possible, even if one must criticize or even condemn specific words or actions.
As a teacher of adolescents, I am regularly confronted with unacceptable words and actions. If I find myself condemning the student rather than merely the behavior, then I am abdicating my responsibility as a teacher whose responsibility is to help students learn to act and speak responsibly. That does not mean that there are no consequences for inappropriate or gross or unkind or flat out unacceptable or illegal words or actions, but that should not place the student completely and irrevocably beyond mercy. Unfortunately if I am honest, I have to admit that my frustration level with some of what I have experienced in school this year has meant a severe diminution of my willingness to be merciful, and as a result regardless of what the future holds I have a need to do some healing and apologizing.
As for our already ongoing primary battle, I worry that we are already starting to eat our own. It is fair to fully examine the records of potential nominees. That they may have changed positions, however, should not necessarily be a cause of condemnation, but rather an occasion to congratulate them, affirm them, when they have moved in a positive direction, learned, grown.
I can look back at all the people I have admired, either in history or those I have actually known. I can find fault in all of them, including the monk on Mount Athos who was my spiritual father for more than a decade. They were all human.
Even in the men who when I was still formally Christian I admired as saints had their humanity. It is part of what enabled them to speak to me.
Of all our Presidents, I admired Lincoln the most, and only then Washington. And yet Lincoln was very far from perfect, as he himself would surely have acknowledged. Washington was a slave owner, at a time when many around him were realizing that chattel slavery could neither be really justified nor long sustained. I suspect many of his fellow slave-owners at the time of our nation’s founding would have recognized the inevitability of slavery becoming ever more untenable. They were willing in 1787 to ban the further importation of slavery in 20 years, and they banned slavery in the territories covered by the Northwest Ordinance (although one of the states from that territory, Indiana,became during the 1920s the center of the revival of Klu Klux Klan for a while). And yet it was not easily to disentangle the economic system in which they found themselves from slavery. Does it represent a lack of integrity? Almost certainly. And yet they were, as are many of us, conflicted between differing pressures on them.
I have financial obligations that are far less severe than those faced by the likes of some of our founders. Yet I have at time worked in situations where when I was fully honest with myself I recognized I was at least somewhat compromising my integrity and clouding my moral compass.
As a politician one usually has to make compromises. I think most Americans can accept that of those for whom they vote. Sometimes people I greatly admire make votes I know they don’t agree with as a means to advance a cause to which they are committed. Should I reject them for that? Don’t I similarly at times have to make such compromises?
The question is not that one has compromised, but whether one is willing to be honest with oneself about what one has done. That can be difficult.
Just as it is very difficult for my middle school students to back down publicly, which is why our school has way too many conflicts and physical altercations. Recently one teacher got a broken bone in his wrist from breaking up an altercation. We are told as teachers not to physically intervene and we risk losing our teaching certificates and even being prosecuted if we do. My instinct has always been to protect, which is why 9 days ago I was involved in attempting to break up two fights, one between two students of the same gender where I was successful by grabbing wrists and keeping them apart (and a cell phone video of that went viral in the school) and the second attempting unsuccessfully to break up an altercation with hitting and punching between a student and a parent of different genders.
That same instinct may explain some of my involvement online, but not all of it. After all, I can be nasty and sarcastic, and often have to bite my tongue or curl my fingers away from the keyboard in order to refrain from the cutting quip.
In May I will be 73. I think my reflection this weekend, at the midpoint of a very difficult school year, has enabled me to realize is that I want what I do with my life to be more about healing. To heal requires one to properly identify what needs to be healed. That can require what might otherwise seem like confrontation or challenging. As a teacher it is incumbent on me to do just that with my students’ thinking — and behavior — if they are going to grow and develop.
I have a somewhat incomplete understanding of what it means for my personal behavior. I know that there are two set of words from Hillel the great rabbi of the time shortly before the Common Era. He once said that we should not do towards others what would be distasteful towards ourselves. That was the entirety of Tora — the law. The other, from the Pirke Avoth 1:14, is this:
“If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?”
I have always been reflective. Too often I have achieved some understanding, but then failed to act thereupon.
I have too little life left for that to continue to be true.
How then do I live a life of healing?
According to my understanding of healing, I am the wounded healer — it is precisely my woundedness that empowers me to be a healer, or as the Sufi mystic Rumi wrote, “The wound in the place where the light enters us.”
Does the rumination I have just presented have any meaning to anyone beyond myself? I do not know. I suspect that at least parts of it will speak to some who may encounter it. Thus I post it.
Make of it what you will.
Peace.