Every Careless Word
Thoughts on the Stakes of Teaching
It was at a wedding last month that a student approached me with a question. The question had nothing to do with Latin, the curriculum, or her next year’s teachers, but was simply, “We’re going on vacation next month. What was that place in Yale where you said you had your favorite meal?” The question was unexpected, but there was background to it. In class one day, I had shown the students a picture of a 9th century manuscript I had been able to see while on a research trip in New Haven. The digression was short and the goals were simple: 1) help students realize that Latin is a very old language 2) excite students about old manuscripts and share my own enthusiasm. In pursuit of this second goal, I must have mentioned how on that trip I had an excellent crêpe (perhaps the best meal I’ve ever had). But that was back in early September and the memory of saying so had vanished from my mind. Evidently not from hers. The situation was amusing, certainly, but a sobering reminder of what should hang over a teacher’s head: every careless word spoken in the classroom is heard by dozens of young ears. And how is one to live with that?
No word in the classroom comes back void. William Blake, an English poet, coined the saying that “you become what you behold.”1 It is upon this assumption that a good classroom works: students are called not merely to cover content or analyze artifacts of culture, but to behold what is good, true, and beautiful and to aspire after becoming such themselves. Central to this process is the teacher himself. The teacher is a mediator of the content, skillfully guiding students to it while showing what a trained mind and cultivated heart actually look like. Every teacher wants students to be motivated by the intrinsic value of their content, but they quite often enter into it (at least in the beginning) by imitating the teacher’s love. Love is usually learned by imitation, and it was entirely by accident that I taught this student both to associate New Haven with crêpes and to desire them. But that is how teaching works: when the work is complete, the student will be made like the teacher, none of whose words will have failed to form those who hear.
But in the classroom, words are many. If the teacher aims to develop the students’ conscience and style, the burden of constant virtue and eloquence will be daunting. Any teacher who does not possess a sensitive conscience and habit of self-reflection may become better at transmitting knowledge and coaching skills, but they will never grow in giving a truly liberal education–one that sets students free (liberates them) from folly, vice, and passion. This is why we are so very careful in our hiring at SOCA. Crêpes are fairly inconsequential; much worse can come off the cuff in a moment or seep through mindless comments. The calling is high, and we want only those who recognize this fact and seek to live up to it. It is also why we are looking for teachers who are students themselves.
No good teacher could script their whole day. Thorough lesson planning is of vital importance, but there are too many words to write them all out and too many variables in the classroom that require a nimbleness and buoyancy incompatible with reading a lecture verbatim. At times the tongue will have to speak out of that which fills the mind and heart. In that instance, the teacher must have already trained their mind, cultivated their heart, and practiced their tongue in eloquence. Doing this requires that the teacher has actively embraced the life of the mind and is not living off of college lectures half-remembered or training lessons watched years ago. If the mind and heart is to overflow, it ought to flow with rivers of living water–not those drawn from some broken cistern.
The teacher bears the weighty task of helping to raise young men and women, to “lead forth” (the literal translation of “educate”) children into knowledge, skill and wisdom. The potential for success is as great as is the nature of man but the teacher, constantly beheld and heard by impressionable young souls, must live with the habit of weighing their words against their students’ futures. Every teacher knows their own failings and at times is burdened to see the effects that they have on their students. And so we come to a virtue which teachers must both practice in their own hearts and model for students: hope. A hope, indeed, for both the teacher and the students. Only when the despair which oozes from a teacher’s shortcomings is banished by a hope coming from outside themselves will a teacher truly be equipped to bear the burden of speaking and acting in the classroom, able to really “burn with a gemlike flame”2 as they delight in what is taught, and prepared to train the minds and cultivate the hearts of young men and women.
The source of this saying (often “we become what we behold”) is actually somewhat complicated. The saying occurs 8 times in Blake’s work Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, though never exactly in this phrasing: sometimes it is “they become…” and it is usually in the perfect tense, “they became what they beheld.” Furthermore, I have never read this work. Like many little lines of poetry, it has become a proverb on its own merits and, plucked from context, has slightly changed in form so that the truth stands on its own.
Another delightful saying from an English romantic whom I have not read. This time Walter Pater. The wonderful image may, again, be even better out of context.