There is a common myth that teachers teach and students learn. It is true, we teachers attempt to impart massive amounts of curricula yearly. Some of us do a better job than others. We each have our unique styles, our tricks up our sleeves. Each day we muddle through, doing our best to make the boring exciting. The minutiae of it all is not the purpose of my writing a blog. No, I'm here to divulge a dirty little secret that has been held in trust by teachers for centuries. While it is sometimes true that we teachers attempt to teach; teachers, especially seasoned ones like me, know a slightly different reality. We teach in order to be taught by our students. It is through those students that we learn, if we choose to accept them, lessons about life and how to live well. It is those lessons I have learned and continue to learn that I care to share in this blog.
Although I have many stories from close to thirty years of teaching, I'll start with a lesson I learned from a little girl growing up as one of the few Jewish children in a public school in Hamilton, Ontario in the 1960's. Each year as the Jewish holidays came 'round, this student would stand up in front of her class holding up, in Vanna White fashion, a menorah at Chanukah time, or a box of matzah at Pesach and would cheerfully teach her classmates about the customs and traditions her family celebrated. For the first few years, it was a fun activity. It was fun to be recognized, fun to teach others, fun to be proud of her heritage and the fact that she was different in a good way. By the end of elementary school, however, it became, well, obnoxious. Why, she wondered, was she always having to explain herself? If she 'gets' other people's beliefs, why don't they get hers? As you have undoubedly guessed, the little student was me.
Luckily for me, years later when I chose to enter the realm of education, I remembered the little girl in elementary school and instead of going the public school route, decided to become a teacher in a Hebrew Day School. It was a conscious decision, based largely on the fact that I wanted to work in an environment where I would never have to explain myself. I have to tell you, after all these years, I have never tired of walking into a class on Fridays and asking, So, what are you doing for Shabbat? Decades of teaching have passed and I still get a kick out of hearing that a kid is late for school because he or she was at a bris. Conversations about yom tov dinners put a smile on my face. And here's my secret thrill: I'm tickled at the thought of being able to relate the secular things I teach to all things Jewish. Some might say I'm simply being creative. Nah. All I'm doing is reveling in the fact that I'm in a place where everyone 'gets' me, and in turn, I 'get' them.
And isn't that something we all want in life? For people to 'get' us? How hard do we work every day for our spouses, our friends, our siblings, our parents and our co-workers to 'get' us, so that we needn't have to explain ourselves? The best relationships are those where we can sit back and laugh and cry with each other, knowing in our hearts that what we say and do will be accepted because we are truly understood. These are the relationships I strive for and cherish.
As I blog babble, I will endeavour to take the anecdotes and events I experience now or remember from back when, and extract the lessons I've learned from them. The little girl inside me taught the bigger me just how important it is to be in relationships where the person or people 'get' me. Hopefully as time unfolds, you and I will 'get' each other as well!
