April first is a good day to consider the limitations of seriousness. Teachers, myself included, often take our work seriously in many ways, perhaps one or two ways more than we must. It is hard to stay serious without also falling into rigid thinking about the subject, the students, and oneself, and a rigid mind is infertile ground for curiosity. The straight-and-narrow seeker had best be lucky enough to find a path that does not curve.
Today when many people look for ways to surprise each other, we teachers often find ourselves looking for ways to instead keep things under control. An acquaintance tells me: “I don’t like surprises. I like to know what’s going to happen.” But we never know what will happen next. We only fool ourselves into believing we do.
As teachers, our work is to see our subject with fresh eyes so that we can effectively convey it to our students’ fresh eyes. It is also our work to see the student anew, because it is useless to teach yesterday’s student.
And ourselves? We are most familiar with our own internal world, and it is easy to think we know who we are. But such certainly can blind us to movement, to possibility, to insight. To our best of teaching tools: ourselves.
Today, let us take a moment – a split second, perhaps, if that is all we can manage – to play the fool, to allow ourselves to be surprised by something, perhaps our subject, or our students, or ourselves. It is in this moment of surprise, if we let ourselves look, that we can see through the cracks of what we think we know to undiscovered lands beyond.
Thank you for this reminder.