“I teach because I love seeing the kids learn. And if I am totally honest about it, I love the person I am when I teach. I give, but I also take. I can see that I have the chance to change lives, but my life is changed to. Teaching is my way of living the best life I can live, of being the person I most want to be, and feeling that my work connects with my heart every day.” – High School teacher, Chicago Illinois

What makes a great teacher great? Is this teacher’s case, a big part of the answer is the way she sees her role. While this teacher generally does the right things in the right ways in her classroom, that’s not even close to the source of her greatness. Here’s the core of it, the clear statement of teaching as a way of life: “Teaching is my way to live the best life In can, of being the person I most want to be.”

 
For this teacher, teaching is a particular way of being in the world. It is her art, and not just the expression of who she is, but a structure and support for the best version of herself. Teaching is the embrace that gives her life the form and shape that she loves most about herself.

 
While it is unusual among most teachers to hear people say “I teach because teaching makes me the person I most want to be,” in my experience it’s pretty common among the very best teachers. As this high-school teacher in Chicago says with such beautiful clarity, it’s a matter of her heart.
Here’s another teacher who put a similar idea in different words:

 
“There’s something almost selfish in what I’m doing. They don’t pay me all that much, but the fact that they pay me at all is kind of amazing. I get so much from what I do, even when it’s a struggle. Maybe especially when it’s a struggle.”  – Math teacher, Los Angeles, California.

 
We can probably all agree that there’s little risk of teachers being paid too much for their hard and essential work, but this math teacher is expressing the kind of joy and wonder that remain inside the very best teachers even though a hundred forces in our society, from overeager supervisors to under-motivated students, sometimes seem engineered to erase them.

 
Both of these teachers represent something vital in the way that we should think about educators in our society. Too often we focus on discrete skills and tasks that we teach. They are certainly vital, and no good teacher can focus too much on the abstract when there are more practical thinks like writing, science and mathematics to be learned, and we’re the ones trusted to make sure that students learn them. And yet consider for a moment the easy – and false – distinction that I’ve just snuck into this little paragraph: skills and tasks (like science, math and writing) versus abstractions (like, for example, critical thinking, or the very broad range of soft skills we often put under the label “learning how to lean.”)

What we now take for granted as the facts of mathematics, or the lists of memorizable details of living organisms that we study in science class, or even the rules of correct grammar, are all the results of complicated and quite abstract ideas interacting with each other. I can quiz you on the periodic table to see how well you can use this complex tool that presents key information about all the elements, but the table itself is the product of social and philosophical debates that help us understand what, exactly, different elements are and do. When the people doing the most cutting-edge research into the physics of planet formation focus on the middle states between gasses, solids and liquids, we often teach the periodic table as a fixed and final list of the way things are.

 

‘Then we take out the container of liquid hydrogen so that we can freeze things like helium balloons and hot dogs to demonstrate important scientific principles. “Wait,” some observant student will say, “I thought hydrogen was a gas. How can it be a liquid?” “Well,” the teacher says in response, “under some conditions some gasses can become liquids.” So, the difference between gasses and liquids isn’t as simple as we often present it as being. The world that science describes is more complicated, if we are totally honest about the world, than we generally present it as being when we teach. The same is certainly true in every other subject. We teach short-cuts to student writers – like “Never begin a sentence with a ‘And’ or ‘Because.”

 

But we read beautifully crafted and perfectly correct sentences that begin precisely so: “Because I could not stop for Death,” Emily Dickinson writes, “[h]e kindly stopped for me.” Perfectly correct. But if we pretend that language is a simpler thing than it truly is, it becomes easier to teach. If we pretend that the physical world is simpler than we know it to be, then science is less taxing for the teacher – but missing so much of its magic. The challenge is to allow into our classrooms some of the complexities and even some of the contradictions that give the subjects we study their particular and humane shapes, so that students will understand that teaching and learning are soft-edged processes, friendly to experiment and imprecision, and requiring trust and forgiveness every now and then.

American poet Walt Whitman captured this quality of education – and of life – perfectly when he replied to his critics in his long poem “Song of Myself”:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
This small bit of poetry says a tremendous amount about the teacher’s vocation. Our classrooms certainly contain multitudes and innumerable contractions. Our academic subjects are filled with (wonderfully) unfinished ideas and challenges, our educational goals are multiple and – alas – often contradictory themselves. But most clearly Walt Whitman is talking about the contradictions within himself and within all of us – contradictions that we may wish to cure, but which he tells us are the very origin of our human depth and sympathy. We each can be different versions of ourselves, versions that contradict. If we reject this human fact, we fight something inherent and inherently good. Through our internal contradictions, we learn sympathy with people who are not like all of whom we are, but part of whom we are. We find the connections of common desires and common fears, even if we would prefer to deny those desires and fears in ourselves. We learn the range and flexibility of the individual human mind and soul, and we learn that contradiction is itself an engine of understanding.
The great teacher sees the multitude within and cultivates the teacher-self, but he and she also cultivates an acceptance of the other sides of identity, and uses that un-resolved complexity of who we are as a way to accept the contradictions and affirm the richness of the classroom, the school community, the form and the shape of the world that we teach about, and ourselves.
Listen to your students. Contain multitudes. Who do they need? Be more than one person. Be your favorite teacher for a few minutes. Or be your favorite student. You don’t have be everybody, but take the challenge to be more than one.