But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” – James 4:6
Yesterday, Jeremy B. Jones came and talked to my Non-Fiction and Its Process class. He teaches non-fiction at Western Carolina University, and he read some of his super fascinating current book project and liberally dropped quotations from cool people like Anne Lamott and Richard Hugo and Marianne Moore and used Harry Potter references to explain how essays should work (e.g. memoirs should be filled with “portkeys”) and was just a consummate professional.
Now, Jeremy’s got pedigree and the ethos to spare. Boasting an MFA from the University of Iowa and a first-book memoir that’s won awards will do that.
Add to that that I’ve felt like an imposter all semester teaching this class and that the topic was the real deal for him? You have the ingredients for seeing a master display that left invigorated and more than a little humbled.
I moved from jealousy to humility pretty quickly. Once I realized that he was going to namecheck more essays and talk more helpfully about the writing process in one hour than I had all semester, I went from being upset to glad. This wasn’t my expertise, and my students needed to hear this. I was the piano teacher down the street who had taught them scales, but now we had Glenn Gould in the house and he was not only an expert performer, he was a skilled commentator on giving performances. I had been plinking out “Chopsticks.” This dude was dropping Goldberg Variations.
Plus, Jeremy is an old friend, a colleague from our Charleston Southern days who was much more than just the co-worker you were glad was on your team. He was our friend. Yesterday gave us an excuse to hang with him for a couple of hours, and it was good for the soul.
As I reflected on the process of being humbled in front of my students by my very own guest speaker, I wondered whether or not I could have felt so magnanimous had the course been something I pride myself on being an expert in.
Next semester, for instance, I’m teach a British Literature survey. If I invited my diss director to show up and rap about Spenser, I know he would wow them in a way I perhaps never could, but then he’s a retiring academic superstar with ethos and charm to spare.
Jeremy is roughly my contemporary age-wise though, and I wondered if I would be willing to give the Brit Lit survey over to a younger scholar and let her show my students the possibilities of lurking in Thomas Wyatt’s sonnets that I somehow obscured and then still feel glad about having let her in the door.
The reflection made me realize how invested I am at being the smartest person in the room and how much my ethos depends on me knowing all the right references and having the right answers to my students’ questions. This is a disastrous stance to take, not necessarily because being the smartest person in the room is wrong, but because it’s so grace-less and prideful.
If I’m not willing to serve my students with what I know, my knowing more than them is actually a detriment to their learning. Jeremy’s allusions and illustrations–learned as they were–never felt forced or designed to impress. They were, to use Jeremy’s reference, portkeys, means by which he could help my students into a meaningful place or memory. Or if the references were not always that ambitious, then they were strategically placed footholds to give students something to stand on while scaling sheer cliff face of their writing process.
Education is not a contest, and it’s not a zero sum game, and thank God I will never exhaust the possible ways of seeing and expressing the truth or run out of excellent writers (like Jeremy) to read who see and express truths that I’ve never begun to fathom.
This is what makes writing and teaching so invigorating and, yes, humbling.