They led me to the well…

There is a quote from Albert Einstein which came to mind after doing some of this week’s readings. His quote is: “I never teach my pupils, I only provide the conditions in which they learn.”

In my early education experiences, I was fortunate enough to have teachers who allowed me to learn at the rapid rate at which I needed to consume it and truly created the conditions for me to learn. In Kindergarten, I was the only one reading when starting school (chalk this up to sibling rivalry as I have an older sister who had been going to school and got all the neat school books…so I learned to read early to swipe her stuff!). My public, city school teachers, worked with me independently to help me learn and challenge me. This continued in first grade with another wonderful teacher who worked with me independently, pushing me gently to reading at higher and higher levels and giving me individual spelling lists.

Second grade was a different story and I got lost in some bureaucratic stuff I did not understand at the time. Fortunately, I was having part of my days with a third grade class across the hall (for reading and English) and that teacher then was my advocate and champion. Because of the individualized needs I had and the willingness of the teachers to create fertile conditions for my learning, I was able to get to a place where I was matched intellectually. That happened in my second/third grade year.

As I said, I was very fortunate to have such excellent advocates and champions at that stage of my learning. Thankfully a lot of my desire for learning was fostered during this time, so when I did come across teachers who were there to impart what they were required to the student masses I was able to learn what I could while still maintaining my desire to learn; regardless of the teacher’s outlook on how they were teaching.

Reading some of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when he describes some education like the knowledge was “a gift bestowed by those by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” made me recall those kinds of teachers with sadness. Because of my early education experiences, I felt valued and that I had this knowledge deep inside myself, only I did not know it yet. My teachers were the ones helping me discover it. When I encountered the teachers who poured out information in class like water and we, the students, were the cups.

I am so thankful for all of those teachers I had over the (so very many) years of my education who did not simply pour out the water; rather they led me to the well and showed me how to draw the water. What really stands out in my mind, as I look into my near future, when I am at the front of the class, is that I want to be like the teachers who inspired me to learn. I want to be the one to create the environmental conditions for my students to learn. I hope to lead them to the well and show them how to draw the water themselves. For I hope that they, like me, will become life-long learners. Learning because they want to, have the need to, and the know how to learn in formal and informal ways. Even on their own.

So, from that little girl who felt that it was fun, exciting, and special to be learning, even when it meant being kind of separate from my peers, a heart felt thank you. Because of that desire for them to teach in non-oppressive and non-traditional ways, I had excellent role models all these many years later.