Saved in my files is this photo of a room. There are about forty wooden chairs, each with one arm containing a writing surface. Off-white walls, carpeted floors, a front podium, and windows through which I can see tree-lined ridges. This room is where I moderated one of my first college-level workshops.
I only moonlight as a teacher. I seek out generous instructors who let me join their classrooms to workshop topics I feel zealous about. I get this rush from helping others become emboldened by their experiences brought into accord with the ideas of others.
I first tasted this passion working as an interpretive ranger at a historical site with the National Park Service (NPS). I was a poor history student because my mind did not care about getting dates and names right. What I wanted, and what some of the good people in the NPS helped uncover, was to share the joy of how the past communes with the present.
This, I think, is why most people show up to a classroom. It is a timeless formula. Put forty individuals into those wooden chairs from my photo; gather forty people under the branches of an oak tree at a historical site; forty digitized squares on a video call can even get us there. The linchpin is the head of the classroom: the instructor, the moderator, the teacher.
When I advise students as an academic administrator, I often remind them the most difficult part of education is showing up. Being present anywhere is a complicated thing to achieve. In my decade as a member of educational communities, I aimed to help classroom leaders remember this. Their goal is to reward the people who show up. Have a script, arrive with the structure of your ideas intact, but remember that this might not be enough for those who arrive to share a space.
Inside classrooms, great happiness can be found from improvisation. I experienced this during a storytelling workshop I gave to an undergraduate interpersonal communication seminar. In this seminar, they had been reminded that world history is a patchwork of overlapping stories. My task for students was to try and guess who, from their group of classmates, was telling a specific story. They submitted short, personal stories to me before the workshop, and I read a few aloud in the classroom. One of the big takeaways – their reward – was in realizing it is not always easy to know someone through a story we hear about them.
I have another photo – this one not saved in physical files. It is the memory of my high school history classroom. The chalk boards were green and my teacher displayed handwritten notes on an overhead projector. Our quizzes asked us to recall names and dates from a textbook. My scores were often one or two correct out of five. I do not recall it being a classroom that rewarded me. Yet this place was almost certainly where my zeal for education was conceived.
Special thanks to Anna Fitzgibbon of OutGrowth. Anna encouraged me to write a reflection on the theme of education for the site's August 2022 newsletter. Thanks are also due to Mary Bendel-Simso and Erin Watley, professors at McDaniel College in Westminster, MD. Mary and Erin were the first to invite me into their classrooms. Some of the experiences I describe above would not be possible without them.
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