Notes on Teaching and Learning

"The highest wisdom is kindness." - The Talmud

When I teach graduate students, at some point in the quarter I usually make a difficult admission. I level with my students that, deep down, I really hate teaching. It's not their fault. They're wonderful - bright, engaged, funny. It's always a privilege to spend time with them. I love class discussions, especially when they get deep or challenging. And I like if I can help someone in their career, whether it's by writing a recommendation or just offering a word of encouragement. Despite all this, I hate teaching.

Why is this? Because I don't know how to teach yet.

My problem with teaching has something to do with my philosophy about therapy and about being a human in general. When I'm in therapy with clients it feels very important to me to take a collaborative approach. This means that I don't presume to have any special knowledge. I'm not smarter or wiser or better than you. What I bring, rather, is a skill in facilitating a certain experience where we can figure things out together; to facilitate a situation where our dormant wisdom might naturally emerge. For me, this is the essence of good therapy. To put things differently, I view therapists as experts in process more than content.

By the same token, my least favorite kind of therapist is the one who is presenting themself as the "expert" and bombarding their clients with unsolicited advice. I believe that an unfortunate number of therapists - intentionally or unintentionally - harm their clients by "one-upping" them in ways overt and subtle. By claiming to have the answers; by touting their expertise; by making decisions for the client instead of letting the client decide. In this way, therapy can serve to feed the grandiose delusions of the therapist and also enforce dependency and beliefs of powerlessness in the client.

More generally, my philosophy is that humans in our current state of evolution are capable of relations of both domination and equality. The history of the species is marred by instances of domination: wars, slavery, caste systems, the subjugation of nature and animals. History also suggests, however, that our species is capable of collaboration, connection, and relations of radical equality. And here's the important thing: I believe we have the capacity to evolve personally and collectively in the direction of equality and cooperation. It is a possible destiny of our species for us to be able to attain mutual recognition of each other and our shared humanity. The critical question we face is whether and how we can evolve in this direction, and whether we will be able to complete this evolution before our species is eradicated by a massive own-goal like climate change or nuclear war. The perennial choice for our species is between power-over and power-with, and we're running out of time to decide.

The coming election in November 2024 will be an important choice point...

Shifting from the cosmic to the personal, I also just have an extreme aversion to feeling like I'm talking at people, or talking down to them. Likewise, I have an extreme aversion to feeling like I'm being talked at, or talked down to. It's just a felt sense that I feel strongly in my bones. When I was younger, I grew up with narcissistic traits, and a large part of my personal journey of growth has been healing my own feelings of superiority and, naturally, the feelings of inferiority that gave rise to them (in narcissism, one flips from "one-down" to "one-up"). In this way, my personal work connects with the way I try to show up for clients, and also my hopes for humanity. Micro, mezzo, and macro perspectives often collapse together in this way. As a culture, we need to continue to unravel broader political systems of domination and promote social policies that support equal dignity; and, this work has to happen alongside our own personal work of rooting out inner drives for domination and oppression in ourselves. One cannot happen without the other.

Returning now to classroom...I'm standing at the front of the class, staring at a room of twenty students, expecting me to say something. To be at the front of the class is inherently to be in the position of the "expert." I begin to feel nauseous...deeply uncomfortable. How can I talk to them without talking at them? How can I tell them things I think they should know without squashing their own insights? In short, how do you really teach?

To make things more complicated, students often express that they want me to give them answers. After a few years in the field, I often have some good answers. Here it can be useful to distinguish between information and knowing. When you spend years in a career you accumulate a good deal of information, information that is useful to people just starting out. For instance: what questions do you ask a client who is suicidal; what's the correct way to document a session; do you always need insurance? It feels less problematic to convey information like this, particularly when students request it. Information is different than knowledge.

Another factor in facing our own inner "expert" is a certain trend in our culture. In short, nowadays everyone wants to be a teacher and no one wants to be a student. As the wellness industry has exploded over the past two decades, it's brought with it a proliferation of people presuming to teach us about ourselves. Our online lives are rife with life coaches, spiritual coaches, mindfulness teachers, trainers, and gurus of all kinds. Consider the friend in your feed who's done some kind of teacher training and is now posting things like: "What are you grateful for today?" Now, there's nothing wrong with gratitude. But there's a presumptuousness in assuming you have the right to ask me the question. There's an implicit power in being the one asking the questions (note to the therapists out there). We're living in the age of teachers, and it's not helpful. By contrast, when I think of the greatest teachers I've studied with, they often did not set out with the intention of teaching. They typically set out with the intention of learning and then, after many years, were called to offer their knowledge back from a spirit of service.

So, I'm not really sure how to teach yet, but I'd like to learn. Some themes are beginning to emerge the further I go. I know, for instance, that in the teaching I'm after there will be an increased emphasis on dialogue. I know that students will take an active rather than a passive role. Class discussions and small-groups tend to work better than me giving a long lecture. I'm experimenting with students taking turns teaching course content, so the role of teacher rotates. I like the idea of bringing in different perspectives on the materials besides my own, through the use of videos and guest speakers. Lastly, at the end of every class, I like to elicit feedback ("What worked and what didn't work?") so students can have constant input into how the course is proceeding.

It's also comforting to know that the question of what it means to teach and to learn is an old question that many people have struggled with. In ancient Greece, Socrates was deeply concerned with the problem of how one learns. In one text, he proposes "Meno's paradox," which can be roughly stated as follows: learning is impossible because it is impossible to inquire about knowledge that you're not already aware of. If you are already in a state of knowledge, there's nothing to inquire about. But if you are not in a state of knowledge, you don't even know the subject about which you should inquire. In this paradox, Socrates imagines a radical chasm between knowing and non-knowing, and wants to understand how a teacher could possibly carry a learner across the divide.

Ultimately, Socrates calls upon his famous "theory of recollection" to resolve the problem. In brief, for Socrates, souls are immortal and were once in a state of knowing before they came into their embodied and now ignorant state. Thus, a teacher must merely remind the student of what they already knew when they were immortal. The student is never in a state of total non-knowing that they must bridge; they must merely recollect what they always knew (when they were in their immortal form). Teaching is just really reminding. In another text, Socrates argues that the people we love are usually our greatest teachers, because in love we connect most easily with the experience of being immortal.

Teaching then will never truly occur if we envision the teacher as a professional knower arriving to bestow knowledge on some benighted student. Teaching might, however, occur if the teacher arrives in a true spirit of partnership, and embodies as best as they can the virtues of inquiry, justice, respect and equality. This kind of teacher might ignite a critical spark in the student, might summon a kind of knowledge that is more like a remembering.

This way of thinking about teaching reminds me of a line from one of my favorite poems, "St. Francis and the Sow," by Galway Kinnell. In the poem, Kinnell envisions St. Francis offering a blessing to a sow and her offspring. He writes, "...sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness." Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.

The Kinnell poem, in turn, reminds me of a favorite poem by Rumi:

"I like when the music happens like this:

Something in His eye grabs hold of a tambourine in me,

then I turn and lift a violin in someone else,and they turn, and this turning continues;

it has reached you now.

Isn’t that something?"