Teaching is an act of faith

This is something that I often say to my students (prospective teachers). As a teacher, we never really know our own impact and influence on our students, for good or ill. We just do the best we can, based on the best information and theory of teaching/learning we can muster, and hope for the best.

Oh, I know that in this era of Accountability and Scientifically-Based Research (someday I should post on that phrase), teachers are supposed to Know What We Are Doing, to use only tested and proved (approved) methods, to use data (test, test, and test again). We must Demonstrate What Our Students Have Learned From Us (as defined by curriculum standards and measured on standardized multiple-choice tests), and this demonstration is taken to be the measure of our worth and value as teachers.

And we do know what we’re doing, sort of and somewhat and sometimes. I’m not an all-or-nothing sort of person, and certainly teachers should teach intelligently, using the best information about their students available to them, and using methods that they have good reason to believe will be effective and beneficial. I spend my professional life working to that end, so believe me when I say I am committed to that goal. Also, society does have a vital stake in what teachers do, and legitimately can and should hold us, and the educational system in general, accountable, which requires information about the results of our actions.

Nonetheless, even considering that any given teacher knows much more about her/his students’ learning than the scores on however many tests, what we know is vastly outweighed by what we don’t know and for the most part will never know, even in the short term. Furthermore, what really counts is not so much what a child learns from us this year, as how we influence or impact who and what s/he becomes as an adult. Ultimately the “outcomes” we are interested in is that the young person grow up to be a reasonably happy and productive adult, in his/her personal life and her/his public life in both the commercial and civic realms. How can we know how or to what degree we’ve influenced those outcomes? For the most part, we can’t. Hence–teaching is an act of faith.

I was reminded of this, and inspired to write this post, by a story on NPR the other day, about a teacher who got a letter about one of her students some years after the student had left school. The student had been killed, and the letter had been written by his friend. The teacher had struggled with this kid, a difficult student by all accounts, lecturing him frequently about his behavior, sometimes driven to The Raised Voice. After the boy left school, she had felt she had somehow failed him, left with nagging feelings of doubt and inadequacy and even guilt with which teachers (and parents) are all too familiar.

So when she received the letter after the boys death, in which his friend explained that he had experienced the lecturing and even the yelling as “she was doing her best for me” and “it showed she cared”, it meant a lot to her. She kept the letter in her wallet, reading and re-reading it until it was worn and raggedy.

Teachers do treasure these glimpses into the realm of unknown influences, at least when they are positive. It means a lot when we encounter a student years later and learn that we meant something important to them, or influenced them in some important way–or even some small, but remembered way. These glimpses help maintain our faith in what we do. And knowing that the negative examples are there–whether or not we learn of them–helps keep us humble, and constantly seeking to improve. This is just as true for me, in my work with adults who become teachers, as it is for K-12 teachers. I treasure the memory of a couple of young women who came up to me at a workshop I was leading, unsure that I would remember them (I did), and told me that they had learned a lot from me, that they hadn’t realized the full value of what I was teaching them until they had their own classrooms, and that they felt what they had learned about planning from me had been most valuable. (I put my students through a lot, and they often, I know, feel it’s overkill. Yet I persist–as an act of reasoned and, I believe, grounded faith.)

But another way in which teaching involves faith is highlighted by the fact that the story told by NPR was about a boy who never got to grow up. He was killed at a young age. It reminds me of a time in my own life.

Many years ago, I taught high school math in a small school on the Navajo reservation. I went there intending to stay for only a year, promptly fell in love with the place and with the students, and ended up staying five years. Here I want to tell part of the story of one boy; I’ll call him Yazzie (not his real name.)

Actually, I have many stories about Yazzie; he became one of my pets (I know, teachers aren’t supposed to have pets, but nonetheless some students touch us more than others, and we become more entwined with their lives, so even though the word “pet” doesn’t really fit the relationship, it’s short and it’ll do.) He was a difficult student–he tended to punch teachers’ buttons, and he was often the topic of unhappy, even irritated, conversation among his teachers. He had a drinking problem, he often ditched, he rarely did his homework, and he was a master at subtly (and not-so-subtly) challenging authority. I liked him. And somehow, I got through to him (some of my stories about him are about how that happened.)

Partly because of my efforts with him, and of a couple of other teachers, Yazzie did manage to graduate from high school. I moved away from the reservation the following summer, but I had left some things stored there, so when I again moved the following year, I needed to go back and collect the things I had left there. I asked Yazzie to help me move, and he agreed. He helped me load the things I had left there, helped me drive up to Idaho, helped me load my things from there, helped me drive them to my new place, and helped me unload them there. While we were in Idaho, I took him up into Canada just so he could say he’d been outside the United States. Altogether, this was the furthest he’d ever been from the reservation, and the longest he’d ever been away from home. The trip meant a lot to him.

About two months later, I got a phone call from his sister. Yazzie had been killed in an automobile accident–he’d driven off the road and smashed the vehicle, and himself, beyond repair. Some people assumed he’d been drunk; others insisted he hadn’t, because they knew he’d been sober less than an hour earlier, but no autopsy was done, so we’ll never know. No other vehicle was involved (as far as we know), so it remains a bit of a mystery as to exactly what happened.

There’s much more to the story–this is just the bare bones–but the point is that his death so soon after that trip and only a year after he graduated left me questioning the value of my work with him. Had we (myself and the other teachers who had worked so hard on his behalf) wasted our time? Yes, he graduated–but so what? Did that alone make it worth it? Some of the other teachers–teachers who had given up on him long before he graduated–felt it had been a waste of time, and said so in so many words.

But I decided it had been worth it, that in fact his death made it even more important. And this belief is a matter of faith. It is not objective, it cannot be “proved”, there is no test or data that would substantiate it. The data is in–Yazzie graduated, and he died a year later. He never “made anything of himself”. All he had of life was finished at 19. To me, this means that making what he did have of life more bearable, helping him to accomplish something (graduating from high school felt like a major achievement to him), expanding his horizons a bit–all this mattered in itself, not just in terms of future payoff. As I really think it does for all students, all the time. But this is a matter of faith. My faith in teaching. Which I, and teachers in general, need in order to sustain us in our work.