Some time ago my teacher told me that I had just asked a very good question. Then he said that the answer didn’t matter, that the question was the important part.
But — the answer mattered to me. More so now that I had been told it was a good question. Didn’t a good question deserve an answer?
So I asked again. Again, he would only say that it was a good question. Could I have stumbled onto a question so hard my teacher didn’t know the answer, but wouldn’t admit it? Perhaps he was keeping the answer from me simply to be annoying, something I frequently suspected him of doing. Why wouldn’t he answer?
In any case, there was no answer. The question remained open.
Not long ago my student asked me a question. It was a very good question, and I told him so, and then told him to keep asking such questions. Like my own teacher, I didn’t offer an answer. But now I knew why.
I had many answers to my student’s question. I might even have had one that would have left him satisfied. But his question was important, too important to answer simply or to freeze into place with one answer.
For hard questions there are often many good answers and the answers can change over time. More important than any single answer is that such questions create a path on which the student may find good answers.
Give a single answer and the student is likely to stop asking the question. Give many answers and the student is likely to try to find just the one that is right and then stop asking the question.
Tell the student that the questions are the important part, and that the answer is not necessary, and you frustrate them, as I was frustrated.
But you also keep them asking. And this is the deeper answer.
It is not always easy to to refrain from answering questions when you can see answers. Recognizing when you have been asked a question of depth that is best served by refraining from offering an answer is something a teacher can only do when they are willing to get out of the way of the teaching. This can be hard, even for seasoned teachers.
Questions open doors, but answers may shut those doors too soon. A good teacher keeps the questions coming, and provides answers in careful measure, so as not to stop the really good questions.
This brings to mind the following quote:
“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 – Letters to a Young Poet
The best answers don’t close doors, but rather open new ones to reveal another enticing vista for exploration.
We as teachers are also eager for our own answers, and consequently so willing to offer answers to our students. How do we teach ourselves to let our own questions be open as long as possible, so that our answers, as they come — and our questions, as they change — have every chance to be as full and rich and deep as possible?
I think that when the Teacher allows the student to see they don’t have all the answers either, it’s an opportunity to teach that this is not only okay but a desirable thing. How else can a Teacher teach finding joy in the mystery of the unknown while still striving to find answers?
There are a lot of good reasons for a teacher to appear at least a little knowledgeble, but most of us get caught in the ego-trap of wanting to show that we know enough to be the teacher. There are some interesting tensions there. For myself, this is why I like the practice of looking for a chance to say “I don’t know.”
To your question of how a teacher can find joy in the mystery of the unknown while still striving to find answers, well, I don’t know. But I like the question very much.
[...] There are times when your student needs certainty, solidity, answers. This is a resting place for them, a space in which to gain courage to venture out into the openness that holds no certainty. To seek not answers but deeper questions. [...]