A Teacher Who Can Arouse a Feeling-Daily Meditation 2.12.24

Today’s Quotation:

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he or she who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today’s Meditation:

It’s a shame that most teachers I know have forgotten this concept.  It usually isn’t their fault–they become involved in schools or school systems that value numbers.  Test scores, attendance figures, grades, and grade averages–have become important indicators of whether a teacher is effective or not.  Whenever the system becomes more important than the individual, then individuals suffer.

Teachers aren’t nearly as able to look at their students as thinking, caring, and feeling human beings as they should be.  They have to spend so much time on lesson plans and changing curricula and grading and classroom management that they often aren’t able to focus on being a human being who teaches other human beings.  In addition, “arousing feelings” isn’t a concept that’s all that valued, for feelings aren’t quantifiable.  Besides, learning about facts and figures and information is valuable; it’s just that its value is overrated.

All that said, we know that teachers tend to do the best job they can in their situations, and most of them try very hard to be valuable influences in the lives of their students.  But we can help them.  Not all teaching takes place in the classroom, and not all teachers are hired by schools to teach entire classrooms full of students.

We definitely have the ability to be teachers ourselves.  We may not be qualified to teach algebra, but we can read a poem to a child (or even a friend!) and discuss what it might mean.  We can go through a book on animals, look at amazing pictures, and learn by reading captions as we “teach” someone else.  We can listen carefully as someone explains his or her ideas, helping that person to clarify those ideas.  There are many “teaching moments” every day, and if we keep our eyes and ears open, we can recognize them and use them for all they’re worth.  And the more we do it, the more we learn ourselves, and the better we get at it.

The important lessons in life rarely happen in a classroom.  But if we step back and think that we can’t teach because we’re not “teachers,” then we lose many opportunities to do many wonderful things.  And if we don’t teach because we assume that someone else will, then everyone loses.

Questions to ponder:

1.  What were some of the most important lessons you’ve learned?  Where have they taken place?

2.  What are you really good at, and how could you pass along your knowledge and passion for the topic?

3.  What do you think is the most important lesson anyone could learn in order to put them on track to live a happy, fulfilling life?  Is this lesson taught in schools?

For further thought:

Real education should educate us out of self
into something far finer–
into a selflessness that links us with all humanity.-Lady Nancy Astor

Education should be of value to men and women both as private individuals and as free, self-reliant, and responsible members of the community to which they belong.  It should help them, as individuals, to grow in self-mastery and personal depth, to develop wider and deeper appreciations, to acquire enthusiasm for hard work, to love good talk and good books, to delight in the adventures of intellectual curiosity, to become fair-minded, open-minded, and generous in all their human responses.-American Association of Colleges

If you missed our last Daily Meditation, it is here.