"Another learning I would like to mention briefly is one of which I am not proud but which seems to be a fact.  When I am not prized and appreciated, I not only feel very much diminished, but my behavior is actually affected by my feelings.  When I am prized, I blossom and expand, I am an interesting individual.  In a hostile or unappreciated group, I am just not much of anything.  People wonder, with very good reason, how did he ever get a reputation?  I wish I had the strength to be more similar in both kinds of groups, but actually the person I am in a warm and interested group is different from the person I am in a hostile group. Thus, prizing or loving and being prized or loved is experienced as very growth enhancing,  A person who is loved appreciatively, not possessively, blooms and develops his own unique self. The person who loves non-possessively is himself enriched.  This, at least, has been my experience."

 

-- Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being, Houghton Mifflin. 1980.  p. 23.

 

Who Wants a Perfect Teacher?

 

by Harold C. Lyon, Jr.

(Originally published in the Christian Science Monitor and reprinted with permission)

 

          In contrast to the violence in our classrooms we read about so often today, my educational dream of the future is that we as teachers could take off our roles and masks and be individual human beings relating with other human beings instead of playing the teacher role -- then we’d have the warmth and motivation in the classroom that we lack.

 

          I’m not advocating that we become amateur therapists in the classroom or elsewhere -- teachers are not legally or professionally qualified to do that -- but I am saying that we can be human beings in the classroom.  When this happens, we begin to allow people to be.

 

          It’s not easy to take such risks.  But to stand up in front of a classroom as a genuine person can be a freeing experience.  This is the difference between what I call “status and natural authority.”  Status authority comes from hiding behind a podium, a degree, or a title, lecturing down to an “inferior” group of students, waiting to be filled with your superior knowledge.  Natural authority is earned from sharing in a learning experience with a group of colleagues by bringing together all your resources, books, experiences, friends, feelings -- and the students in the classroom who are the most important resource of all.

 

How many teachers think of bringing a friend, who may be visiting, into the classroom to share with the students?  Friends are so rare.  As I get older, I begin to realize that if I have two or three on whom I can really count, I am indeed blessed.  To bring a friend into your classroom to share with your students can be a peak experience for you and your friend, as well as for the students.  Friends are one resource that you have.  And the students in the classroom are the most important resources of all.  They learn more from one another than they do from the teacher. The teacher who is most effective is a good catalyst, a facilitator who can implement that kind of discovery.  This is a teacher who doesn't have all the answers. You never will, so why pretend?

 

The thing that is beautiful about us is not our perfection but rather our imperfection.  This is what makes us human.  A human being is not perfect.  The hothouse fruits of life, grown in the “perfect” protective environment of the greenhouse, don't have nearly the flavor of those that are exposed to the wind and the rain and the elements.  The same thing is true of people. Those people who are overly protected -- who look perfect -- don’t have the flavor of those who are more natural. What’s beautiful is our humanity which may be imperfect but real.

 

 Who wants a perfect teacher?  A perfect teacher is phony.  Who wants a perfect wife, a perfect husband, a perfect boss?  Those people are not genuine.  You lift a tremendous burden off your shoulders when you shed your need to be perfect - to look as though you have all the answers. And this, for me, is a vital discovery!

 

          My over-achieving image of perfection began when I was five years old and my father left for World War II.  As he left he said:  “Now, you be good; you’re going to be the man of the house.  You take care of your mom.  You be good and I’ll hurry home!”  That stuck in my mind through childhood and adolescence.  I had tried so hard to be good, and he hadn’t come home for three and a half years, and I had kept trying, thinking I just wasn’t “good” enough.

 

          In wanting so badly to take care of my mother, I instantly “grew up”, skipping over the tender times of childhood.  That’s when I first became an over-achiever, trying to gain all those accomplishments in order to let them speak for me.  But what I really wanted was for my father to come home.  I wanted to be held and loved to make up for what I didn’t have enough of as a baby -- few of us do. I suspect that’s how many of us become over-achievers.  If we’re fairly bright or fairly talented, we climb all the ladders to get the rewards held up by society rather than seeking for the rewards from within.

 

          But when we finally discover we can get important rewards from within, this discovery frees us in a new way.  It’s a freeing from being dependent on everyone else.  It’s growing from environment support to self-support.  This is what maturity is about -- leaving the support of the environment and being able to get most of our approval from within ourselves.

 

          Alfred North Whitehead once said:  “After you understand all about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the Earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset”.

 

          During a crisis in my life -- a “peak experience” of intense loneliness -- I found I could no longer evade the pain of my own loneliness.  In the past I had gathered friends around me or had gotten busy accomplishing things to evade my loneliness but this was a time when I didn’t quite outrun it; it caught up with me.  So I spent a lot of time crying for the first time in my life and deeply admitting to myself that I was very lonely.  Beneath my tough veneer, in my loneliness, I found new strength; I found tenderness, (which my alma mater, West Point, didn’t exactly nourish) -- a new creativity: an undiscovered part of the essence of me.  (I even found a rather likable little-boy part of me that “growing up fast” had almost completely bypassed, and it’s now a favorite part of me.)

 

          This was a kind of “Men’s Liberation” for me -- a freeing from the “macho” toughness I had thought was my strength, and an allowing of the tenderness which I had thought to be my weakness when it was really my strength.

 

          Society teaches us in many ways, and so do schools and parents, to have a fixed set of responses to things.  Certainly West Point conditioned a fixed set of responses in me to many things.  Society encourages this and calls it “character.”  And that means that we have a small, narrow, ego boundary in which we’re secure and which generates a fixed predictable set of responses.  To the extent that we’re that way, we realize a fraction of our potential and numb a tremendous amount of our essence and vitality.

 

I’m convinced that if we can deal with the whole person with feelings and intellect in the classroom, if teachers can begin to deal with children as feeling human beings instead of just intellects to be developed, then there’s hope for education in this country. We have many one dimensional half-men teaching all around the country, often brilliantly developed intellectually but stunted emotionally.  Many of these people are afraid to deal with their feelings -- the affective side of man.  And I believe such an approach reduces violence and has many other benefits as the research of Tausch, the Aspys and Roebuck will show in this book.

 

          You can integrate the cognitive with the affective within the classroom. For example, if you are an English teacher teaching “The Red Badge of Courage” or “Lord of the Flies”, break the class down into five-person groups; have each group get rid of a member.  And those who were rejected could perhaps form their own groups and talk to the rest of the class about how it feels to be rejected,, comparing that with how Piggy felt in “Lord of the Flies” or how the hero felt in “The Red Badge of Courage” when not accepted by one regiment or another.

 

          While I worked briefly with the White House Task Force on the Gifted in 1968, we interviewed some of this country’s most successful citizens.  We asked them to identify what helped them most in realizing their potential.  Most had the same answer to that question.  Some person -- a teacher, a coach, a respected adult -- had stepped out of his or her role and rank, taken off his or her mask and status, and built an intimate one-to-one human relationship with these individuals -- encouraging them to believe in themselves, to take risks and try things they wouldn’t have tried without such encouragement.

 

          How we can build such mentor relationships with students was a concern in our efforts for gifted and talented students 25 years ago, and it continues in not enough schools today.  What traits does such a mentor or teacher have?  I think they are the same traits which Carl Roger’s research found to be significant in therapists and Tausch, Aspy, and Roebuck have found in their extensive studies: Realness, genuiness or congruence in the teacher; prizing or high regard toward others, and empathy out of which grows trust between teacher and learner.

 

          But these are traits very few schools or teacher training institutions are fostering. Is it difficult to teach these traits? Aspy and Roebuck show us that this is not nearly as difficult as one might think. You have to let people discover these traits in an environment in which such discoveries can take place.  This is the kind of environment where we tend to be human beings instead of superior cognitive intellectuals lecturing at students.

 

          When you reach that place, you are so free that another strange thing happens for which I have no explanation (and I’m not going to look for any, as I’m sure the phenomenon would disappear as soon as I intellectualized it).  You become a mirror. When other persons look in your eyes they can feel their own beauty in your reflection.  It is as though you mirror their beauty and they feel good about themselves.  Now, there is no cognitive explanation for that.  It’s just something that happens.  My hope is that teachers or facilitators can free themselves enough to become mirrors for their students in which the students can see the beauty of themselves as real human beings, or that managers can be that way with their employees. 

 

When that happens, we begin treating people the way we treat sunsets. Carl Rogers once said, that, when we look at a sunset no one says, “It needs a little more orange in the cloud cover, a little more pink on the right hand side.”  You allow it to be.  That’s one of the joys of sunsets -- they’re all unique.  You allow them to be just what they are.  This is what this book is about…and we present the research to support this person-centered viewpoint.

 

 

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