The Responsibility of a Teacher

     I talked yesterday, and had a pleasant dinner with, a group of alumni from my college.  They were students of a famed teacher, Robert L. Gaudino.  He was an immensely dedicated teacher, committed to the idea of "uncomfortable learning," challenging fundamental assumptions and, even, identities.  I was impressed by the deep effect this teacher had on his students, evident still forty years later.  And it made me think some about my responsibilities as a teacher.

      Of course, Confucius came to mind, particularly this passage from the Analects:

"I only instruct the eager and enlighten the fervent. If I hold up one corner and a student cannot come back to me with the other three, I do not go on with the lesson.” (7.8).

 This makes a good deal of sense to me.  A teacher provides an opportunity for the student to learn, but it is up to the student to follow through on that opportunity, to seize the moment and take the initiative in learning.   The end product - whether or not the lesson is actually learned - is not the teacher's responsibility.  Rather, we open the way forward; the student has to walk down the path himself. 

     I raise this here because I think Gaudino had a different notion.  Although I did not know the man, my sense is that he felt a duty to not simply provide the opportunity to learn, but to follow along and push and cajole students as they went along.   This obviously had a profound effect on the student involved.  But was he going too far?  Was he revealing to the students more than one corner?  Or was he simply more insistent that they actually show him the other three corners, after he had revealed only one?

     How far does a teacher have to go in showing his students the Way?

Comments

[lirelou]

The responsibility of the teacher ends when they have shown the corner. It is the students resposibility to come back with the other three. A teacher who shows all four corners has abandoned teaching for operating a projector. This does not mean that the teacher does not advise his students as they seek to define the paths ahead of them. Rather it means that the teacher provides the intelectual tools, and the student takes it from there.