Do you love your students? If not, maybe teaching isn't for you.

In which I examine the ins and outs of this proposition

Photo by Undine Tackmann on Unsplash

There are two categories of living beings who stop me in my tracks and make me beam involuntarily: dogs and toddlers. They just make me happy! They’re so cute and unself-conscious! I just want to squeeze them!

But do I want to teach them? Do I want to go to a classroom full of them every day and try to get them to fetch or learn to read? Even if I love fetching and reading and want everyone to be able to do them? No. No way. I just want to watch them and beam.

So finding kids (or dogs) inescapably adorable does not necessarily translate into wanting to teach them. What exactly, then, do I mean by “love”?

I mean curiosity. I mean genuine delight in.

When I see, for example, a gaggle of teenagers walking down the street, I do not smile foolishly and watch them until they disappear. Instead, I feel curious about them. What draws them to each other? Where is their kindness? Where is their fear, their insecurity? Where is their potential for growth and goodness?

When I faced a room full of college students (back when I taught college), I wondered what they’d teach me about themselves. Their strengths. Their limitations. Their methods of avoiding struggle. Their capacity for relationship with people and content.

Now, when I face a group of teachers in a Teacher Support Group, I’m eager to hear about their travails. What gets them down. What upsets, angers, frustrates, frightens them. Where they’re entrenched. And I love helping them open up and see the world in a different way.

The love I feel for dogs and toddlers is definitely an attraction. It is a response to their cuteness and energy and unabashed out-there-ness, qualities I so appreciate. But get me in a room full of them and I’ll run screaming out the door. (This is why I’m not a dog trainer or early childhood educator.)

The love I feel for adolescent and adult learners is also an attraction. But I think I’m attracted to what’s hidden in these groups, what has been suppressed and needs cultivating. I’m attracted to the messages their behavior sends, their SOSes, their psychic and cognitive needs. Their potential. Which a relationship with me and others — and, sure, the content I’m teaching — might spark and nurture. (This is why I teach adults.)

I would not blame you if you’ve been thinking, “Yeah, DUH! You have to want to support the growth of the students you work with if you’re a teacher.” Great! We’re on the same page.

What about content?

But you might also be thinking, “Yeah, DUH! But what’s more important is a teacher’s knowledge of the content.”

OK so: How does knowledge of the content translate into effective instruction? And by effective instruction I mean success in transforming your students into reliable knowers of that content.

I know. There are plenty of students who learn what they’re in school to learn without their teachers’ love. Lay out the content for them and they’ll do the work out of duty or desire for good grades or, hallelujah!, intrinsic interest and motivation. But, honestly, how effective is learning that is done out of obligation or desire for good grades? Do such students become reliable knowers of the content? If students are not intrinsically motivated, how effectively and reliably are they learning? How long will their learning last? How much of that content will they actually remember?

(Think back over your education. What do you remember? Probably feelings. Vibes. Connections with inspiring adults and peers. Terrible experiences with cruel adults and peers. Where’s the content?)

And then, of course, there are the students who do not learn what they’re in school to learn. How do you teach content effectively when your students are not wholly compliant? Show me the content-oriented teacher who doesn’t dislike (or fear or even hate) the student who thwarts their teaching. What makes content-oriented teachers hang in there when their knowledge of the content they teach is no longer enough?

Hence, my proposition

Seems that it’s much easier for a teacher to hang in there if they love their students. If they value their relationship with each student as much as or more than they value the content they teach. If they remain curious — or develop curiosity — about what students’ surface behaviors teach about what the students need. Or what the students already know. And what they don’t know. Or how they view the world, or the content they’re expected to learn. Or themselves.

How can teachers sustain this foundational love, this desire and ability to be healthy developmental partners to their students, even (and perhaps especially) the needy ones, in this age of collapsing schools? How willing and able are school administrators to love their charges, the faculty and staff who work for them?

And what about parents, who can be such dickheads to their kids’ teachers?

I don’t have the answers. I’m just thinking: Teaching is (obviously) not a spectator sport. It isn’t about loving students the way I love dogs and toddlers. I do not believe it can be just about loving the content. It’s about (I believe) wanting more than anything to support other human beings in their healthy growth and development. Even (and perhaps especially) when they bring their worst behaviors into the room.

Doesn’t this mean schools should be promoting healthy relationships among the adults in the school, including parents? And doesn’t it mean schools should be blitzing on supporting their teachers in the deepest ways possible so they can continue to love their students in the ways psychic and cognitive development require? Shouldn’t teachers want this support?

I don’t know. I could be wrong. Let me know what you think.