The Courage to Teach

Six months ago, over hamburgers and fries, Dr. Willem VanGemeren suggested I read Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. I’m glad I heeded the suggestion. If you’re a teacher, preacher, or educator, you’ll find some gold in this book. The nuggets begin to show up on page 1 as Palmer introduces the book’s intended audience:

If you are a teacher who never has bad days, or who has them but does not care, this book is not for you. This book is for teachers who have good days and bad, and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts because they love learners, learning, and the teaching life.

Here are a handful of quotes from the book that have been impacting my approach to teaching:

No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching
requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp.

we teach who we are.

knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives, and this book is about helping that teacher show up.

We learn experimentally that we thrive on some connections and
wither with others, that we enhance our integrity by choosing
relationships that give us life and violate it by assenting to those
that do not.

If a work is mine to do, it will make me glad over the long haul,
despite the difficult days. [commenting on Buechner's famous
definition of vocation: "the place where your deep gladness and the
world's deep hunger meet."]

Unlike many professions, teaching is always done at the dangerous intersection of personal and public life.

In a culture that rips paradoxes apart, many people know nothing of
the rich dialectic of solitude and community; they know only a daily
whiplash between loneliness and the crowd.

the classroom should be neither teacher-centered nor student-centered but subject-centered…this is a classroom in which teacher and students alike are focused on a great thing.