Day 6: Teaching is Relational

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care!” -Theodore Roosevelt

My educational credo was established early on and mentored by two lavish souls who modeled what educators should be! (Mind you they exemplified what the soul of education should be, not what it is.)

I began my 35 year teaching career at Monrovia High School - the high school that I had graduated from in 1969. As a young teacher, I started bright-eyed and hopeful that my newly found spiritual philosophy would change the educational world as it had changed mine. I soon discovered it was not going to be that easy. Students' lives were so much more complicated than my naive hopefulness could imagine.

Then I met Frank and Pete - polar opposites on the outside, soul mates on the inside. Frank was an intellectual, fundamental Catholic. Pete was a dyed-in-the-wool, self-proclaimed atheist. Both were committed bachelors - but they loved kids and were married to their jobs. They knew the students’ lives and family situations because the listened.

Frank was loved by the elite kids and challenged them with brilliant passion to think for themselves. Pete was drawn to the broken ones - those left out of the “cool group” and disenfranchised by the educational system. Both men changed my life and mentored me by modeling how teaching could make a difference.

After countless district and state run teacher training seminars, I experienced firsthand the massive dysfunction of the public education system; I was convinced that it was not for me. Not only was the pay far less than my contemporaries who had entered the work force as construction workers or truck drivers, it was a job that could become less important than building a home or moving fruit across the county. It seemed a better use of time to build or move something than to baby sit teenagers without building or moving them at all. But Frank and Pete were builders and movers and they did it with completely different styles.

Pete and Frank would often hang out together after school. I would find them in one or the other’s classroom usually with several students. Discussing religion, politics, sex ... nothing was off limits or taboo. I was coaching, so I was often at school well after hours, but rarely later than these two.

Soon they began to invite me with them to local establishments for dinner, which always included more dialogue about the art of teaching and students’ lives. Many times the discussions went late into the evening. Education is not about standardization, it is not about newfangled teaching techniques. It is about building and growing and that is done through compassionate relationships. Above all else I learned it is worth it.

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