Tag Archives: School

Education

A Message to Students

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On the first and last days of school, there is a script running in my head that I’ve constructed from sixteen years as a student, two student teaching experiences, and five years as a teacher.

I like to watch their faces. There’s a lot of nervousness at the beginning of the year, some eye rolling, a few shy smiles. By the end of the year, the faces are warm and happy, comfortable, excited. The relationship has changed. The message, though the same, has more meaning because it comes from a place of mutuality. Together, we have learned, shared, and experienced.

At the beginning and end of each year, I tell my students that I believe everyone has the power to make a positive impact on the world. Impacts can range from personal to local to global as students grow older and begin to think bigger. For example, students can be more caring towards one another, volunteer in their communities, donate money, set up charities.

The reason I became a teacher, I tell them, is because I believe in their ability to act to improve of the world around them.

This is why, I tell them, they do so much research, work in groups, read, write, communicate, think, reflect, make decisions. This is why I challenge them. This is why I expect them to grow and to learn every single day.

Finally, I tell my students that the only way any of this is possible is if they believe that we are partners in their education. I am not a person who makes promises, but every year on the first day of school I promise my students that I will do as much as I can to help them be successful.

From conversations throughout the year, I know that I have made good on that promise.

At the end of the school year, I remind my students that I am here for them, even though I may not be their teacher any more. When I’ve moved on, I give students my personal email address because I don’t believe that location changes acts of caring. I tell them that they can always ask any questions, let me know what’s new in their lives, or just say hello. Sometimes they do.

At the end of the year, my hope is that my students have internalized the message that I care about them and believe in them and trust that they can make an impact on the world. That’s the goal, above everything else.

Thinking about this today, our last day of classes, has led me to reflect on action. It’s one thing to tell students that I believe they can make an impact; it’s quite another to provide them with concrete opportunities to do that.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s measure impact in terms of “lives saved”. What would an education system look like if we required students to save one life each year? What sorts of actions would they undertake? What would they learn about charitable donation, effective altruism, fundraising, extent of impact based on different actions, earning to give, social enterprises, NGOs?

A friend and I have recently been toying with how to implement real life saving into curriculum. If you have suggestions or thoughts, please post in the comments section below. I’m really excited about it so stay tuned!

Education

More Than Talking

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“I had some really delicious Indian and Sri Lankan food the other day. It was great!”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Either the call dropped or you’re ignoring me.”

“No no, I’m here.”

So why the lack of response? That’s the question I was left asking myself after a phone conversation this morning. Why the lack of response?

As an educator, I am constantly looking for ways to demonstrate to my students that someone is listening to them. When they speak, I respond. When they tell me something they’ve done or something they’re excited about, I ask questions about it, wish them luck, or tell them I hope they have a great time. If they tell me that something is wrong, I ask what I can do to help. I remind them that they can always come chat if they need to. I leave sticky notes on their desks asking if they’re okay today.

A huge element of teaching is about developing relationships. If my students know that I care about them, they are more likely to learn in my classroom. We can have challenging conversations when they feel that their voices are being heard, their opinions matter, and their ideas will be taken seriously.

When classroom cultures develop around these attitudes and behaviors, real dialogue takes place. Real learning happens.

Last week, my grade ten students wanted to continue a Socratic Seminar that I thought we’d completed. They clearly had more to say, so we went with it. They started off by asking questions about the relationship between religion and violence; over an hour later, we were deep in a discussion about renewable energy.

My students’ questions drove the conversation. As vocal students willingly expressed uncertainty, they encouraged quieter peers to speak up and provide their thoughts and questions. Some students explained that they’d changed their minds over the course of our discussion, while others remained convinced of their own ideas. Some wavered back and forth and laughed at their own equivocating. Others admitted to feeling a general sense of uncertainty and apprehension that hadn’t occurred to them before our discussion.

It didn’t really matter.

The point was that they’d talked. They’d heard each other. They were willing to be open and vulnerable, question their classmates, express their ideas, and respond to challenges from their peers. They didn’t just talk; they listened. Through listening, they learned. They operated in the safe space that we’ve created this year, and they learned as a result.

Cultivating dialogue is vital with students, and equally so among adults.

But why is it so difficult?

One factor that I think makes dialogue challenging is being present. We spend a lot of time with our attention torn between one thing or another – email, social media, back-to-back meetings and deadlines, a pervasive need to “be there” with multiple people at once. We live in a society in which “busy” often denotes “good”. We feel the need to justify spending time alone or with just one other person.

I would like to advocate that we take a deep breath and a step backwards. The students in front of me are enough and they deserve my complete attention. The friend who joins me for coffee is enough and deserves my complete attention. The person on the other end of the line is enough and deserves my complete attention.

When I give you my complete attention and respond to you and what you’ve said, dialogue will take place. If I am only half-listening, if I am only partially there with you, dialogue is simply not possible.

In addition to practicing compassion, I am also working on being present. I want to listen to you. I want to hear you. I want to see you. This way, we can engage in dialogue, affect change, and make the world a better and more peaceful place.

 

Education

Practicing Compassion

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Compassion is very high up there on the list of values I use to guide my actions and decisions. Showing compassion means working towards an understanding of others’ beliefs, actions, behaviors and demonstrating that understanding to them.1 Understanding where others are coming from and verbalizing that understanding, when appropriate, paves the way for dialogue. Dialogue is essential if we are going to build a better and more peaceful world.

In doing so, I separate actions from individuals. It’s not you, it’s what you did. This means that people are not inherently wrong or evil or bad, but their actions may be. In an educational context, there is therefore room for self-reflection and self-improvement. If we explicitly work with students to label behaviors or actions as unacceptable, instead of individuals themselves, we lay the foundation for choosing to be better.2

Where I’ve consistently run into trouble, however, is when I start thinking about the truly “bad people” who don’t fit into the metric I use with my students. These people are Pol Pot and Hitler and Stalin and ISIS. They are people who have murdered, harmed, broken millions of innocent lives. These “bad people” have always been a barrier for me when I think about showing compassion to all humanity, which means I haven’t been very compassionate at all.

Last week, I had a conversation with a friend where I shared my thoughts on how to approach students who act and behave in ways that harm others and need to change. My friend, also an educator, suggested that harm comes from two areas, insanity or ignorance. Insanity could be the result of anything from undiagnosed illness to lack of attachment in infancy to an emotionally-driven crime of passion, which made sense to me as an explanation. Ignorance, however, made me squirm. I accept ignorance from young people because they need to be taught before we can expect them to actively choose not to harm others. I am not as forgiving of adults, however, because they should know better.

My friend commented that such a vein of thinking seemed like dangerous territory, and we changed the subject.

In my personal quest to be a better person, I recently started reading Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard.3 I read the following passage while on the treadmill a couple days ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since:

At first sight, it may seem incongruous to treat an enemy with kindness: “He wants to harm me, why should I wish him well?” But Buddhism’s reply is simple: “Because he doesn’t want to suffer either, because he too is under the sway of ignorance. Because this ignorance makes him harm others.” True altruism consists of wishing that the harm-doer become aware of his deviance and thus stop harming his fellow beings. This reaction, which is the opposite of the wish to avenge and punish by inflicting more suffering, is not a sign of weakness, but of wisdom.

I read that paragraph twice. Continued my run, read a few more pages, and then went back and read it again.

That’s when I understood what my fellow educator meant about dangerous territory when commenting on my (not so rational) rationale for blame.

Buddhism teaches that ignorance causes suffering. Ricard explains ignorance as “the mental confusion that deforms reality and gives rise to an array of mental obstructions such as hatred, compulsive desire, jealousy, and pride.” This nuanced definition of ignorance, rather than the colloquial “lack of knowledge and understanding,” and the link between ignorance and suffering, have fundamentally shifted my understanding of practicing compassion.

If ignorance causes suffering, we need to find the root of that suffering and help each individual overcome it so that we can put a stop to harm.

Searching for the root of suffering and helping others overcome it is compassion.

If ignorance → suffering → harm, then placing blame on those who are ignorant certainly does put us in dangerous territory. Well spotted, educator friend.

Understanding leads to action. Action, in this case, means forgiveness. It means moving past the harm, terror, and despair and moving toward a positive, constructive, and open-minded way of approaching all people in the best interest of building peaceful societies for all humanity. Action means ameliorating circumstances and situations that cause ignorance, so that ignorance does not cause suffering, so that suffering does not cause harm. It means figuring out where the problems are likely to be before they manifest as the mental obstructions that Ricard defines as ignorance.

I admit, my fresh understanding is 48 hours old and has all the fragility that comes with novelty. Accepting this idea, that ignorance and insanity lead to harm and violence but no one is at fault, is challenging. There’s a glittering, shimmery bubble somewhere in my chest that feels like it’s expanding when I roll this perspective over in my head. I think that bubble is hope. And then I start to think about the implications of what I’m even considering, all the work that has to be done personally and as a society, and I feel the edges of that bubble blur and waver, almost contracting. I recognize what is happening, focus on hope again, and feel the bubble swell.

This is likely why we call it practicing compassion. Practice is an ongoing effort at improvement that gets easier over time and eventually turns into maintenance of a skill. Remaining purposefully aware of the shifts in my own thinking will, ultimately, translate into habits of mind and behavior. Compassion has always been important to me as a value, so now the challenge is to be compassionate in practice.

Suggested Reading

    1. 10 Ways to Have Peaceful, Loving Relationships
    2. Labeling Behavior, Not People
    3. Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard