A Human Response

In my very first year of teaching back in '68, i was shutting a classroom window when somehow I cut my hand. I didn't want to look at my wound because I was afraid that I might be bleeding. In all of my years of learning, I had never seen a teacher bleed.

Trying to be non-chalant, trying to ignore the obvious, I pulled my hand back from the window and started walking towards the front of the room, much like Gene Wilder when in Young Frankenstein he slammed a scalpal into his thigh and never changed facial expression while he dismissed his astonished class. My class had just begun, so dismissal was out of the question. I took just a couple steps when Elma, (I still rememebr her name after all these years) a student in the window row near the front of the class sort of whispered to me "Uh hey, Mr. Rivers, you're bleeding.

I was only five years older than the 'kids' in my class.

I grabbed my handkerchief and wrapped it around my hand but too late. All the kids noticed that there was some blood on the floor. I had to excuse myself. I asked a hall monitor to watch my class for a 'few minutes' while I made my way to the nurse's office. Mrs. Hindmarch, the school nurse, bandaged me up. I went back to the classroom, thanked the monitor and for a moment tried again to pretend that nothing had happened.

A teacher for less than a semester and I had alrerady revealed my vulnerability, my humanity in a way that I had never seen before. I remember hoping that the principal wouldn't find out

When I got back to the front of the class all bandaged up with some of my blood still on the floor and while waiting for the custodian, we had a little talk, my students and I. It was as if I had suddenly turned real and could stop pretending to be a person pretending to be a teacher. I had suddenly turned real.

We connected that day.

So much of teaching and learning has to do with connection. Spontaneously, unpredictably, magically, individually we become real to one another; imperfect beings of spirit, thought, energy, struggle, hopes, dreams, flesh, blood, spirit, syrup and saliva.

We teachers are not attention seeking vampires who live in a classroom coffin springing to life at the sight of students. We are, for the most part, intelligent, educated, civilized citizens hoping to make a mark on the future by professionally attending to the present.

We have our style. Frequently our teaching style comes in conflict with the learning style of a student. If connection is to be made, something's got to give. The longer that I taught, the more able I became to operate within different styles in order to activate my students' pre-existing body of knowledge and wealth of experience. It was my hope to model adaptability rather than lecture about it.

Sometimes, we encourage the student to temporarily depart their learning style and immerse within another which sometimes feels like drowning but more often serves as a familiar form of irrfitation. When connected teachers irritate students, that irritation is only one side of a coin. The flip side of that coin is awareness. We irritate in order to invigorate. Invigorated lessons require the most struggle but once accomplished they last the longest.

Before I cut myself on the window that day, I was fooling with the Venetian blinds. We all have Venetian blinds around our working memories/intuitions If we decide to keep the blinds closed, no light can enter our cons ciusness. When we consciously decide to open the blinds, we're usually amazed to find a teacher next to us in the sunlight celebrating the brand new day.

Elma went on to the local community college. Then she got a law degree from Syracuse and helped me through my divorce. Later she became a judge and rose to the level of State Supreme Court Judge.  

Elma died at 63.

She was my student and my teacher.

That's the way it works when it works.