A Change of Season

All things end. Sometimes silently, sometimes with flash and noise, but still they end. This is true in teaching as well. Teachers leave, students leave, relationships change, and not always clearly or cleanly.

We can wish for passages that are clearly marked, such as graduations, where we have time to adjust and reflect, to be both be sad for loss and glad for movement forward. But in life transitions of such clarity are rare.

As teachers, we have a greater responsibility to our students than they to us, especially with resepct to the greater scope of the teaching relationship. We can – and where we are able we should – speak of these transitions to allow the student to reflect and change under the umbrella of our support and insight.

I once left a school where I had studied for many years, silently and without explanation, because I did not see a better way. I regretted this for some time. Years later, when I spoke to my old teacher, I found that he was less concerned about my departure than I was because he had seen other students come and go, but I know it did not leave him unmoved. It would have been better for us both to have done this in some way together. As an experienced teacher, you can help a student make a transition that they themselves may not be able to understand.

This need not be complicated, or tangled, or even explicit. It may be as simple as providing a moment’s reflection about the teaching relationship’s shift, or a gentle question about transitions, or some thoughts on the nature of the changing seasons.

This can be hard, of course, both for teacher and student. But as teachers we must shoulder this responsibility. Our job is to see the vector of the student’s movement forward, to look for their best interest in learning. For the teacher who finds this change of season painful, and many of us do, I offer this bit of advice: be as gentle with your own heart as you are with the student’s. There is little gain in creating hard edges; life provides a sufficient quantity without our help.

Part of excellence in teaching is showing the student how to move beyond you. With your insight and experience, you can give your student a door to their next season of learning. Perhaps, at the moment of door creation, the student’s best interest will be to stay with you. But knowing how to move forward without you, and knowing that they can, means a stronger, more insightful student – in this season and the next.