Teaching, Living, and Learning: DOING NO HARM

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

DOING NO HARM

“If he did not do much active good, he never did any harm.”

-- Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

It seems to me, more and more, that doing no harm should be the highest aspiration of a teacher. I sometimes see myself, when I’m teaching, as someone sitting beside a smoothly-moving, constantly shifting stream – and the last thing I want to do is step in and try to alter its course. The rivers of my students’ lives are flowing with a wonderful steadiness and inventiveness, and who am I to suppose I can enhance them? Can I make mountains be more majestic? Can I shift the winds from the east to the west? I sometimes wonder at the presumption of we teachers, supposing we can transform children’s lives, when it is no more possible than transforming the way caterpillars become butterflies. It would be a better approach to praise, at least to ourselves, the utter rightness of the students’ lives, the absolute appropriateness of each of them as they sit before me in class. Then, having embraced their intrinsic excellence, perhaps I can help them discover it for themselves.

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I found this quote (below) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. She's describing Fanny Price's home at Mansfield, but the words exactly remind me of the atmosphere I try to maintain in my classroom:
" ... no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted."

...........

The following quote is from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would like my classroom to be like Dr. Strong's school:

"Dr. Strong's was an excellent school...It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the [students], and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of these qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a share in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity."

If I replaced "agent" with "teacher", this passage from a short story might, I hope, describe me in my classroom:
"The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure."
-- from "The Gray Mills of Farley" by Sarah Orne Jewett