Hello from Sourdough Mountain

Thoughts from a distance on the heart of teaching

I keep hesitating to write here, because I keep thinking I’m about to be able to announce that Frog Hollow’s student anthology, The Artist Upstairs, is available. Buuuuut, it isn’t yet! We’re so close, but the lovely cover our talented and immensely patient parent volunteer designer made keeps getting stuck on technical issues, that are not at all the parent’s fault. Anyway, it’s close! And I’ll tell you all about it soon, because it’s awesome, and so full of great kid writing, and I’m really proud of it and of the students who contributed to it. So be ready!

In the meantime, it’s high summer, which means my teaching brain is resting. Many things feel far away, like I might be Gary Snyder, sitting on top of Sourdough Mountain:

I cannot remember things I once read   

A few friends, but they are in cities.   

Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup   

Looking down for miles

Through high still air.

Speaking of friends in cities, one of my friends is in my city, visiting me. (She’s on East Coast time, so she’s gone to bed.) She’s just about to start a job teaching at a Waldorf School after a long time doing things like science, so we were talking about it today. About what teaching really was. And I’ve written about that here before, but it’s the kind of simple thoughts that you have to say many times because they are so smooth and round and whole they sort of slip out of your mind unless you turn them over and over.

Sourdough Meadows

I think that mostly what teaching is about is making a place where kids are fine, exactly as they are, exactly who they are. And at the same time, also holding a vision of them growing.

It’s listening and witnessing, loving who kids are now while also challenging them and expecting things from them. I mean, this is what parenting is too, only with more laundry.

My friend recounted an anecdote where a man told his son Theo’s teacher in a parent teacher conference, when asked about his aspirations for his son, I just want Theo to get to be Theo.

When I hear that idea, my heart gets a rush of rightness. That’s what I want for my child to, for her to get to be herself. Because that self in its full mature form is something as beautiful and powerful and world-loving as a big oak tree. Just like your child. Only maybe they’re a cedar tree. Or a yew. Or a beech. It isn’t indulgent, being yourself. It’s liberating.

She said she was learning that Waldorf education began in part as a response to World War One, with the goal of educating people towards knowing how to create peace. This was a new aspect of that educational system to me, and to her. She felt this was something she could get behind, and I think that’s important. It’s important to have a deeper sense of why the work you do matters. Education is a profound human endeavor, but it’s good to put it into words sometimes.

And we want literacy, and nature connection, and math skills, and all the other things we might be educating towards on the outside. But the heart of teaching is much more about the how than the what. Kids can learn to read or write in many situations, but let’s not have it be at the cost of estrangement from themselves.