My students were eager for an opportunity to tell the truths of their own lives and I provided it. I could see by their faces how unusual my methods were to them. I invited them to be totally honest and I did not pick apart their papers in public; privately, lightly in pencil, I marked what I would have done with the same material, with the same ideas, with most of the same words. I offered not what I thought they should think and feel but only suggestions, possibilities, that might help them articulate what they thought and felt.
I did not contend with them.
"You express what you have to say," I told them. "I'll help however I can."
Did they!
In the margins of their papers I questioned them to pull them in deeper and at the end of their papers I praised them. The more I asked and praised, the more they wrote; the more they wrote, the more they improved. I covered their papers with comments and marks, dozens of them, hundreds, so that students could see both what they had written and what I suggested.
But my marks carried no penalty.
In class discussion I was honest, open, nonjudgmental.
Their gratitude was clear.
Obvious.
Given opportunity, freedom, security, encouragement, and assistance, students opened their hearts and minds and poured out onto page after page their hurts, fears, loves, doubts, hopes, and joys.
Truth.
In my class in academic discourse we read "The World As I See It," a short 1931 essay by Albert Einstein. In it Einstein explains his opposition to the coercion of autocratic political systems, "for force always attracts men of low morality," and to the herd mentality of the military system which he abhors.
Einstein writes:
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me! I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business…. I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the press.
This passage I read aloud and together my students and I considered and discussed it. In the essay Einstein ridicules the concept of an anthropomorphic and personal god who can be persuaded by ritual and prayer to intervene in human affairs; and Einstein also rejects the whole idea of immortality as an obvious, silly, and absurd egocentric fantasy. Einstein writes that the most beautiful experience human beings can know is of mystery and of the wonder, marvel, and awe that mystery evokes.
He concludes:
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
I tried to help my students to understand Einstein's concepts of science, religion, a religious person, and god. It wasn't easy. For Einstein the goal of religion—all religion—is to liberate all people from the fetters of self so that they may put themselves at the service of all humankind; and for him a genuinely religious person is one who has done this.
"It is very Buddhist really," I told the master.
"I guess so!" he agreed.
The statements by Einstein were strong medicine for my young students, most of whom believed in a personal god, in the power of prayer, and in the bible. My students practiced the forms and conventions of written academic discourse in their short analyses of Einstein's little essay.
It felt so good to teach.
New prompt—
In 250 words or less my students were to identify the world's biggest problem, identify its main cause, identify the deeper cause of its main cause, and to propose a solution.
I wrote, too—
Killing human beings is the world’s biggest problem. Its cause is unhappiness. Everyone wants to be happy. Because they are unhappy, people kill other people. Unhappiness assumes many forms—dissatisfaction, annoyance, frustration, fear, anxiety, stress, discontent, depression, despair, desire, envy, resentment, anger, hatred, even boredom and indifference. Unhappy people determine a cause of their unhappiness—not enough money, not enough security, not enough time, not enough space, not enough rest, not enough respect, not enough love. Unhappy people fix blame. The cause of my unhappiness, they think, is my wife, my kids, my dad, my neighbor, my boss, the whites, the blacks, the immigrants, the aliens, the unbelievers, the religious fanatics, the criminals, the lawyers, the Iraqis, the Americans, the lazy people, the smug people, the evil people, the assholes—the people we’d all be better off without. If she were dead, unhappy people think, I’d be happy. If he were dead, I’d be happy. If they were dead, I’d be happy. If they were all dead, unhappy people think, we’d all be better off. The solution to the world’s biggest problem is to stop thinking this way. Killing is not a solution.
Discussion went well. To illustrate the issues of authority and credibility in academic discourse I briefly compared On the Origin of Species to Genesis and the word of Darwin to the word of God. Without making anyone visibly mad I was able to say that while many of my students read Genesis as history I myself read it only as parable, in Nebraska an admission some teachers consider just asking for trouble. This time I was lucky.
No complaints.
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