(excerpt)
I’d like to take you back to yesteryear, when I was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Arizona. I had come late to a career in education and at the age of 33 had already published four books and worked as a magazine editor. I was complaining about the terrible compositions my students were turning in, how they didn’t seem to be learning very much, despite the fact they had an experienced writer and editor with so much to teach them. My advisor, Richard Shelton, said to me then, “Michael, your students need to know that you care, before they care what you know.” I can’t remember what I replied on that occasion, but the impact of those words have echoed in every classroom I’ve taught in since. Students need to know that we care before they care what we know. Sometimes I chat with the students at lunch, and we talk about their classes, which ones are most challenging, most interesting. Whenever I ask a student what makes a good class, they tell me two things about the best teachers: first, they know their subject areas and teach with passion, second, they care deeply for their students.
Good teachers learn about their subject areas through their enthusiasm for learning and they communicate that every day. They are “lifelong learners” and their teaching is an overflow of their love for their subject. They learn caring, too, in much the same way. By being open to experience, by seeing each child as a unique and special individual, and by embracing and nurturing the child in them, which allows them to be sometimes foolish, sometimes tearful, sometimes vulnerable as they impart their daily lessons.
I’d like to share something about student journal writing and how it relates to emotional intelligence and social learning. Three times a week I give my students an assignment to write in their journals, to look more closely at their lives and explore their feelings. I ask them to write about a moment that changed their lives, or about a lie they told that caused more problems than the truth would have, or about the time they hurt somebody else, about an apology they made, about a missed opportunity, or about dealing with loss. Once a month I encourage them to read one of their journal entries, to say the toughest thing emotionally. I usually begin by sharing one of my own journals, modelling the risk-taking I hope to see from them, and also reassuring them that together the class can build a model of trust and openness about our individual lives which will reveal patterns we all share – hopes and dreams and fears that, when vocalized, live in the healing sunshine of hope, but when hidden, unspoken – rot and fester in unarticulated darkness.
Last month, one student in a quiet voice talked about a missed opportunity when she was younger to play basketball with her grandfather. Her grandfather was ill now, in the hospital – perhaps dying – and her voice cracked as she spoke of the lost opportunity. When she finished there was a respectful and understanding hush in the room.
Then another student got up and read about an impulsive act (stealing a friend’s toy when she was five or six) that almost jeopardized the friendship and her mother’s trust. Several nodded knowingly as she told the tale. Another girl wrote of the experience of being temporarily crippled by an accident. She told of the painful weeks of recovery when she had to go to class on crutches. She shared her fear and her vulnerability as she attempted the slippery stairs under the indifferent gaze of some of her classmates. She told us of her comfort and gratitude when a hand finally reached out to help.
Sometimes I barely manage to blink back the tears as I listen to my students’ journals. They write of human frailty, of struggle, of mistakes, of confusion, with an honesty and openness that is often moving. I know that they are learning values in the literature we study together. But I also know that they are learning and practicing something deeper and more lasting in the risk-taking and sharing that their journals provide. There, they are learning virtues.
Virtue is an outmoded and seldom-used word these days but bear with me here. It takes courage to speak of mistakes you have made, the pain it cost, the lesson that was learned. It takes self-discipline to frankly evaluate your experience, to write about it clearly, and to articulate it with poise. It requires humility to show aspects of yourself which expose you in a less-than-flattering light.
It requires faith in your teacher and in your fellow students to believe that what you say will be understood and received by sympathetic minds. It implies hope that the things you’ve experienced and the lessons you’ve learned will help others. Finally, for those who share their writing and for those who listen, it is an expression of caritas (love in its fullest sense), a sharing in the communion of the human spirit. Courage, self-discipline, humility, faith, hope and love – virtues practiced right there in the classroom. We learn to walk a bit in another’s shoes, to experience another’s pain or joy, as we participate in these stories. Just for a moment, we touch another’s soul, and we find that our own has been touched as well.
What I’ve learned over the years listening to my students’ journals, and what I continue to learn each day, is that when we create an atmosphere where self-expression and emotional risk is encouraged, the practice of virtues flourishes. For me, it is the most encouraging part of my job. For I know that values are abstractions which change as societies change. Virtues, on the other hand, are concrete and universal, and they will blossom and elevate any society as long as they are practiced.
*****
After the terrible tragedy that left the United States reeling from a series of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, with so many of our colleagues and friends and family in the United States filled with grief, with anger, with loss, I asked some of the students about their feelings as I walked around our campus. The results were predictable. “I feel like what happened was horrible,” said one student. “I feel that whoever did this was not human,” observed another. “I feel like this is a bad movie. I just can’t believe it,” said a third.
But it was clear that these students were not expressing feelings at all. They were speaking in clichés, soundbites, vacuous phrases, circumlocutions. “I feel like this is a bad movie,” is a simile, not a feeling. “I feel like what happened was horrible,” is a descriptive statement, not a feeling. “I feel like whoever did this was not human,” is a hyperbole, not a feeling. The students were expressing thoughts, not emotions. They were distancing themselves from their feelings. Not one of the students I spoke with during the next day or two said he felt fear, panic, or nervousness, although these were things I knew the students felt. None said he felt anger or rage at those responsible. None said he or she felt sorrow or dismay at the enormous and meaningless waste of human life. Not one said she felt fragile, or vulnerable.
Why was that? Well, perhaps the poet William Stafford said it best, “I simply do not know,” Stafford said, “exactly what I feel until I write it down. Often my feelings are too contradictory, too nebulous, it is only writing that gives them substance.”
When I pointed this out to my students a week later, and went through the process of listing, with their help, groups of emotions on the blackboard, they saw it clearly. Then, when I asked them to write a journal entry, the results were much more interesting. Not only for them, or for me as their teacher, but for all of us as a society. Because what happened is that the students not only wrote about their feelings, but how they became closer to their brother or little sister because they realized how fragile their lives were. One wrote about concern for the first time with Dad’s flying north on business, and how she loved her father and never realized how much. Another wrote of a friend who was attending school in New York and how they had been like twins throughout their school careers in Guadalajara, and that she was determined that their friendship would go on and not be destroyed as the twin towers in New York were. Another wrote in prose reminiscent of Frederico García Lorca’s poem “a las cinco de la tarde,” about how the date of the tragedy in New York, the 11th of September, the 11th of September, the 11th of September would echo forever in her memory.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most poignant, one student wrote about how looking with her grandmother through old photo albums, the grandmother would always point out someone in a photo and say, “This was your great aunt, she’s dead now.” Or point to an old building and say, “This used to be the store on Avenida Juarez, it’s no longer there now. I don’t remember when it was torn down.” The student, her name was Ana Sofía, thought this was sad, something that happened when you got old.
But then she was looking through her own photo album with the pictures of her trip to New York last summer, the Twin Towers rising over the tip of Manhattan, and thinking how she would say to her own daughter someday, “They’re no longer there now. But I remember the day when they came crashing down. They are a part of my history, and it was a very sad time for all the world.”
So, you see, I hope that what the students did by this writing in their journals was not only to express feelings, or affirm their love for friends and family, but that they also created patterns, they created meaning out of chaos. They created a form out of formlessness, a meaning out of meaninglessness. They gave the tragedy a shape. They defined it instead of letting it define them. It is something many of us have not yet managed to do, yet it is what we must do if we are to keep our balance, our integrity, and our sense of rightness in the world. Revenge won’t give us that, hatred won’t give us that, nor will another century of military interventions give us that. Only our love for each other will provide us with meaning, only our caring will give shape to chaos. And this love, this solidarity of human tenderness and hope, is the heart of all good teaching.
Our students were able to create images of the power of love and caring which replaced those on Fox and CNN of collapsing buildings; they sought understanding in the midst of rancor and bitterness. Students will always strive to make such patterns provided we give them opportunities for emotional and social learning to take place, whether it be in English class, or social studies, science, math, Spanish literature or computers. Patterns create meaning, and meaning is the substance of a successful life. No matter what else is going on in the world, if a child can create meaning, that child will be successful and find fulfillment.
Michael Hogan is the author of 32 books including the bestselling Irish Soldiers of Mexico. He is Emeritus Chair of Humanities at the American School Foundation of Guadalajara, A.C., a consultant to the State Department’s Office of Overseas Schools, and to the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program. He lives in Guadalajara with his wife, textile artist Lucinda Mayo, and their Dutch Shepherd, Lola.
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