When Titanic director James Cameron attended Stamford Collegiate High School in Niagara Falls, Ontario, his biology teacher helped him and his friends form a theater group. This teacher told Cameron he had "unlimited potential." Not the best academic student and admittedly "pretty rebellious," Cameron never forgot those words. "It meant something," he told an interviewer just before Titanic opened, "to have somebody believe in you" (Simon, 1997).
Believing in someone is a concern of the spirit, and it matters in the classroom. When Ian McKenzie, Cameron's teacher, encouraged his student's potential, he was practicing Goethe's assertion that when we treat a person "as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make of him what he should be." Cameron described how this action affected him: "So I said, 'Ian McKenzie said I have unlimited potential. I guess I'd better get busy'" (Simon, 1997).
Most of us can probably recall a teacher who encouraged us. What we do not often think about is how that action of uplifting us also uplifted our teacher. Believing in our own students not only is good for them, but also is a powerfully ennobling experience for us. Moreover, it encourages us to see ourselves as the better people we hope to become.
Marv Levy, longtime coach of the Buffalo Bills, announced his retirement on New Year's Eve 1997. In expressing his thanks for the opportunity to be a coach, he quoted a former teacher, Alice B. Conlan. Asked why she had chosen to be a teacher, she had replied, "Where else could I find such splendid company?" (Levy, 1997).
Did Alice Conlan have students who were truly splendid company? Or was she making a choice simply to see them that way? How could she have known that Marv Levy would become a successful professional football coach? Was it, perhaps, that she simply chose to imagine that he would rise to his potential? Whatever the reason, Marv Levy never forgot her. In a reflective moment at the end of his career, he recalled her fondly.
The Journey from Nobody to Somebody
Let's face it. Most of the students we work with daily have little identity beyond home and school. To the world, they are anonymous nobodies. It is through the way that they are treated, challenged, and coached that they become somebodies. This treatment, of course, must see beyond their present accomplishments, which are usually pretty standard. The spiritual, says the dictionary, is characterized by the "ascendancy of spirit" (Prentice-Hall, 1983). This ascendancy is a journey from being nobody to becoming somebody unique and special—well before talents soar, awards are handed out, and high-paying salaries are offered. A student's "something special" may be little more than a healthy dose of potential, but school people can choose to emphasize and to cultivate it. Anonymity is no match for teachers who choose to believe in their students, even on the slightest evidence.
Teachers, too, can suffer from the darkness of anonymity. It comes to us through isolation from colleagues and parents and through the effects of delayed gratification. Not only are we members of a team with whom we rarely meet, but also we rarely see the fruit of our labors. Especially for those of us who work with younger children, the flower may be years and years in blooming, and it may bloom in some distant place. We may only find out about our students' achievement if someone tells us or if the bloom is so bright that the whole world sees it, as in the cases of James Cameron and Marv Levy. Perhaps a little suffering of this kind is good for us. Daniel Goleman suggests, "There is much to be said for the constructive contribution of suffering to creative and spiritual life; suffering can temper the soul" (Goleman, 1995). Too much of it, however, can be destructive.
Redeeming Our Students, Redeeming Ourselves
The spiritual life of the classroom is inextricably bound up with the notion of redemption, a word that means "buying back." Redemption is deliverance, a liberation from the obligation to suffer in the extreme. Think of teaching as reclaiming students from anonymity and leading them toward deliverance. Interestingly enough, the student, thus redeemed and motivated, provides the teacher with a reciprocal liberation.
The teacher, nevertheless, must begin it all. Anonymity is almost always encased in a powerful inertia that takes great effort to turn. Although some students find motivation in success with content, many cannot even begin to do so without the teacher's effort.
A Simple Effort of Imagination
As educators, we can help ourselves by trying to see all our students as if they were our own children. A variation might be to always imagine the real parents to be present whenever we work with a child. Sadly, we do so infrequently. Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made reference to "our shameful national indifference to children who are not our own" (1998). And writer Alfie Kohn has observed, "We live in a culture that is remarkably unfriendly toward children in general; a 'good' child is one who doesn't cause us any trouble" (1998).
Certainly we must be truthful with our students. They must learn to deal with criticism and bad news. If work and behavior are not up to our expectations, consequences are in order. But that deals with only part of the problem. In the 19th century, it was popular to speak of "redeeming the time" through some uplifting activity—some refinement of thought and feeling—such as reading, studying, or writing. This is a useful way to think of the examples we provide for our students when we structure learning, challenge our students' skills, and demonstrate our belief in our students.
Lifting Troubled Spirits
As certainly as success in learning lifts the spirit, so can a troubled spirit preempt learning altogether. Fear and illness, whether mental or physical, require a response from us that is prerequisite to our helping children learn content. Yet the willful act of believing in a student's ability can overcome many problems. Ruth was a 9th grader who declared that she could not attend classes at our high school. Her fears could not be reduced to manageable specifics. She was simply overcome by them. It was useless for our team to attempt to rationalize them away.
We started by telling Ruth repeatedly that we were in this together, that we knew she could overcome the fear eventually, and that we would make only one demand. She must try every day to spend as long as she could in her assigned classes. The first day she made it through barely one period. Then she came to the office, and we sent her home after telling her that she had done the best that she could do and that we continued to support her efforts. She must, of course, try again the next day, we explained. In just a few days, Ruth was getting through her entire schedule.
Shortly after that time, Ruth moved to a nearby school district, and we lost track of her. She recently returned to see me at my office. She told me that if it had not been for the way we handled her fears, she might never have returned to school. A recent graduate, Ruth told me that she wanted to make a difference in the lives of others the way our team had made a difference in hers. She said that she was planning to be a teacher.
Linda's was a much more difficult case. As a 9th grader, she developed migraines so severe that she had to be instructed at home. Intelligent and quick, she was incapacitated when the headaches came, sometimes for days on end. The medical people were legion: a doctor, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a chiropractor, and a family counselor, among others. They could not agree on the source of the problem, and they were miles apart on how to treat it. School officials also attempted to help, but Linda only retreated further into her isolation.
An administrator began his efforts to help simply by visiting Linda and her family at home. He told them that they were going to figure out the problem and fix it one way or another. They would, he said, take it in small, manageable steps. The migraines had a history of lifting when school was out of session, so when summer came, home instruction allowed Linda to finish most of her course work. Brief but regular discussions with the school team focused on the more distant future—Linda expressed an interest in veterinary medicine—as well as on the immediate necessity of returning to school in the fall.
As the opening of school approached, Linda's family and the team put together a simple plan. Linda would come to school a few times before classes started and walk through her schedule. She could bring a friend. The day before school opened, she made one last circuit of the building. The plan included an agreement that if Linda felt she could not attend school for whatever reason, she must telephone the administrator and discuss it early in the morning.
Some days were successful. Others were disasters. It took almost a full year for Linda to establish a pattern of attending at least three or four days a week. It was a demanding, frustrating situation for all involved, but it worked. Linda graduated three years later in January, one semester behind her original class. She is pursuing her career choice. We still do not know what caused those crushing headaches. What we do know is that they have largely disappeared.
Schools and Spiritual Wellness
In each of these true stories, we had no standard response, no objective cause, to work with. Assuming a cause that was more spiritual than temporal, we responded in kind with a spiritual plan based on a belief in the student's potential—and every effort we could conceive to redeem the student from the darkness of anonymity. When educators see themselves as the custodians not only of academic standards but also of spiritual wellness among our students, we juxtapose those values that matter most in schools with those that are so intricately balanced in the human psyche.
In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman states unequivocally, "In a very real sense, we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels" (1995). Fifty years ago, C. S. Lewis argued for the legitimacy of emotions when he concluded from his own lifelong experience as a teacher, "The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts" (1947). More recently, reform expert Linda Darling-Hammond paused to remind us, "Education should be a source of nurturance for the spirit as well as a means of reaching understanding" (1997). The spiritual aspect of teaching and learning cannot be separated from the understanding of content. Education is not about cutting away excess vegetation, but about planting and harvesting.
Toward Inspired Teaching
Many of us have been around schools for a long time. We know inspired teaching when we see it. Perhaps that is because inspired teaching, the kind that encompasses the spiritual, is not only seen, but also felt and experienced. And it does not happen only in classrooms. In guidance and administrative offices, in hallways and cafeterias, on stages and in gymnasiums, it happens when committed, caring adults choose to redeem the time by valuing both the cognitive content at hand and the potential of the student in question.
Whether the student's concern is mastering a concept in math or simply getting up the courage to come to school, inspired teaching puts aside the familiar, rational cynicism that distances teacher from learner and focuses on nurturing the seed, coaxing it to rise in the desert in spite of the odds. Inspired teaching is performed daily by the often-unheralded masters of our profession. Occasionally, the bloom is so great that thousands notice it. More often, recognition comes in the form of a note, a telephone call, a comment by a grateful alumnus, always, it seems, just when we need it most. We keep folders of such priceless communications to read over from time to time.
The education of the spirit is like a circle game that goes round and round from teacher to student and back again. Like the most powerful dramas, education is certainly about content and theme, but it is also full of energy and pathos. Like our best actors, master teachers give themselves fully and selflessly to their art every day as if it were for the first time. Where else, indeed, could we find such splendid company!
