An Honest Look at Our Responsibilities

“Teachers try to teach students and free their minds. But teachers can only show students the door. It is the student’s choice whether to walk through it.”

I was greeted by this quote a few days ago, just as I’d finished teaching a community college class that hadn’t gone particularly well.

The teacher education students in my last class of the day had been painfully quiet, staring at their cuticles or fumbling for imaginary items in their book bags when I asked them their thoughts on the day’s topic. I saw them reaching for their cell phones, staring at watches, and avoiding my glances.

“Yes!” I thought as I read the quote, all but giving myself a reassuring pat on the back. “All I can do is TEACH. It’s not my fault if those stubborn students of mine chose not to come through the door today.”

But the quote on the whiteboard – and my reaction – left me feeling unsettled in a way I couldn’t quite shake. As I went through the next couple of days, picking my own children up from school, grading papers, writing blog posts and doing laundry, I kept finding my mind returning to the quote – and to my reaction.

And finally, in a particularly honest and vulnerable moment one evening, I realized why I was so unnerved: Because the quote only tells part of the story – and really, it lets us teacher types off the hook far too easily.

Do students have to choose to walk through that door of decision – to take the steps needed to fully participate in their own education and to take responsibility for their own learning?

Absolutely.

But our responsibility as teachers also doesn’t stop when our students are standing in that doorway of decision, making what might be one of the most pivotal decisions of their lives.

We – as teachers who care deeply and who believe that the work that we do has the potential to transform lives in powerful ways – have to be right there, on the other side of the door of decision, enticing students and convincing them that what we are teaching matters, that we will support them while they are doing the work, and that many times along the way, they can even have a good time doing it.

That enticing often requires us to do things in new ways – something I didn’t quite do as well as I should have, honestly, on the day my students were sitting, biding their time until class was over.

What are we doing on the other side of that door, while our students are deciding whether to commit to their educations?

First, we make sure the door has been cracked open by developing personal relationships with the students – and letting them know a bit about us, too. And while they are trying to decide what to do next, we are on the other side of the door, with the students who are already engaged, discussing ideas that matter.

We are communicating in ways that are meaningful – and interesting -- maybe through music, through visual arts, through video clips, through literature, through humor, or through our own brutally honest stories and questions.

And at the same time, we also are reminding them that (guess what?) this whole learning thing isn’t just fun, it also has the potential to make their lives better – that they are securing a better life for themselves and for their families. We are reminding them that the children of college graduates often have better economic futures – that cycles of generational poverty and dysfunction truly can be broken through the power of transformative education.

Do some students, still, with all of that enticing and urging, choose not to cross through the door and commit to engaging in education and taking it seriously?

Yes.

But, if we have done our job well on the other side of the door, odds are good that one day – maybe not long from now – those same resistant students will finally choose to walk through the door and to do what they need to do to improve their lives, not just for themselves but for their families and future families.

And even if they don’t, we keep trying – because the work that we are doing matters that much.