What Teaching Does

Teaching causes me to spend my time in a community of growing scholars.  Whenever I am in a community of scholars, I realize that they are the people that I have spent the majority of my life around.  My life revolves around knowledge which, for me, is a good thing.

As my scholarly life has included teaching now for awhile, I have become more reflective upon the word and what teaching really is.  For me, being a professor means that I approach the classroom as a fellow scholar and not an expert.  This seems to be shocking the longer I teach to my students.  I don't want to be their expert.  I want them to learn and grow.  By default, I do the same.

I can journey with my students, but they choose the destination.  I can't chose how they will live their lives or how they will use the information that I give to them.  My class is difficult for students until they realize that I really do want them to learn and be able to apply the information from the course in the world.  It is difficult because they choose the majority of what they write about based on their own interests and their own response to what the course is giving to them.  It is difficult because they are responsible for all of it.   

The longer I teach, the more I am a guide and learning companion along with my students instead of trying to impart information.  I spend more time wanting and trying to get them to show me how they do whatever it is that they do.   

From time to time, I have a student who needs me to calculate life for him or her for whatever reason.  Life is really easy: choose.  Choose life.  It is only through consistently choosing life that anyone can really grow, learn, and become whom he or she is called to be in the world. 

Teaching is learning at a very different level than I was.  It gives me a lot of practice at asking questions.  I will never have all of the answers which is what I love about it, and my students dislike about it.  They need to find their own answers. 

Essentially, in case there is a question I am able to answer or guide students to, then I am there.  I learn about a tremendous amount of things this way.  Teaching is far more an art of questioning than anything else.