Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.
When I talk to colleagues about teaching, I like to ask them if they had a teacher who taught like they do.
It’s a good way to see where they’re coming from. When they ask the same question of me, I have to say no. I loved my undergrad professors, but I did not walk into my classroom able to imitate their sagacity and gravitas. When I ask my own professors about their teachers, their response is generally the same: teaching wasn’t as important an emphasis for their own mentors as scholarship. As a result, many of my teachers had to develop their pedagogies on their own. Now that teaching is more of a cottage industry, I think it’s more likely the next generation of teachers will have ample models for their own approach in the classroom. This is a good thing.
The other question I like to ask professors is if any of the students teach remind them of themselves. The question isn’t a trick. It’s kind of a Rorschach test that gives insight into who the professor thinks he or she is in the first place. It’s been important for me to disabuse myself of the notion that my students are going to be just like me: that a particular text I think is fascinating will necessarily get them going or that the kind of assignment I would have loved to receive will motivate them to do great work. I think my undergrad teachers thought I had ability, but I wonder whether or not they thought I had more potential than I was actually using, the feeling I often have when in my upper-division courses. I always managed to do my work and get good grades on projects, but there wasn’t a single class in undergrad where I was obsessed with the material outside class. The things I remember most were my scholarly obsessions outside the class—the films of Andy Warhol, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Beuys, and the Zapatistas—more than the content inside the class. What I took from my professors was the general confirmation that they got to do something for a living that I wanted to do. This makes me a student not unlike my professors, but I wonder if they would have said that my own undergrad career reminded me of themselves.
I’m deliberating on these two scenarios because God, of course, merges both transcendence and immanence, both wholly separate from us in his nature and holiness and willing, in Christ, to become human and empathetically experience human existence. Christ extends God love to us, and we take comfort in Christ’s weakness: the fact that he got physically and spiritually exhausted too, though without every breaking God’s laws.
This example makes me want to find more to empathize with my students in their weakness. It helps if I know what kind of teaching they respond to best. It also helps if I remain committed to my own learning so that I know what it’s like when I don’t understand something. As a result, I’ve tried to maintain two teaching
- The first time I give an assignment to students, I actually complete it too. Doing my own assignment both lets me beta test the assignment as well as gives me a more concrete way of talking to students about the roadblocks they encounter while completing it.
- Every summer, I try to read something out of my depth where I’ll get confused at least a couple of times and feel like giving up. One summer it was Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Another it was Ulysses. This summer it was material on the mathematical concept of infinity. I have to remember that this is what Paradise Lost can feel like to them. It’s hepful to see what I do when I can’t make heads or tails out of something I’m reading.
Most importantly, I want to model what an academically rigorous discipleship looks like for my students. Maybe the particulars of my course content won’t turn them into teachers or have them do work that looks like what I would do, but I pray my commitment to learning and Christ inspires them to follow the rabbi who perfectly empathized with their weakness.