A Love Note for Teachers on Parent-Teacher Conference Day

Today is Parent-Teacher Conference Day at the high school. As a parent, I have the easy part of this deal: three 10-minute sessions in which my child's individualized weirdness is distilled into (1) has an amazing variety of arcane information in his head, (2) gets distressed easily, (3) gets excited easily, (4) does his homework too fast. The teachers have the hard job. Drooping under fluorescent lights till well past their bedtime, they get to purvey hundreds of kid generalizations to a passel of parents who are more or less upset that their children won't stop being wacky and imperfect.

Dear teachers, I just want to let you know, in case it doesn't come up in our 10 minutes of examining quiz grades and discussing performance gaps, that wacky and imperfect are exasperating but fascinating. I don't expect you to fix them, though I'd be happy if you enjoyed them. Melodrama has a noble history, and homework is boring, but nail him if he doesn't get it done.

Now go home, have a cup of tea and a hot bath, sit down in a comfortable chair, and start reading a book you will never, ever have to teach. Didn't you become a teacher because you loved your subject? Don't forget to keep loving it--for yourself, first. Because if students start to figure out that their teachers are passionate and curious, then wacky and imperfect might begin to seem like the first awkward steps into a broad and mysterious future.

In "The Tears of the Muses," Edmund Spenser wrote:

Through knowledge we behold the world's creation,
How in his cradle first he fost'red was;
And judge of Nature's cunning operation,
How things she formed of a formless mass:
By knowledge we do learn ourselves to know,
And what to man, and what to God, we owe.

Spenser wrote this poem in 1591. His allusions may not match your contemporary conceptions of nature, religion, or humankind. But there's no getting around the truth that "by knowledge we do learn ourselves to know" and that such knowledge helps us figure out what we owe to the world outside ourselves.

On a side note: Spenser dedicated this long poem "to the Right Honorable The Lady Strange"--a real woman but also, perhaps, a metaphor for mystery and oddness; for those unexpected, jarring, epiphanic moments of synthesis and perception. Dear teachers, I'd like my wacky and imperfect child to meet The Lady Strange in your classes--now and then, between tests and quizzes and homework reviews. She is, as Spenser writes, a "most brave and noble Lady," and her presence can change the direction of a life . . . not just theirs, but yours. The vitality of your passion and curiosity is the greatest gift you share with your students. "Through knowledge we behold the world's creation," and that world includes your inner life. By treasuring it, you teach our children to treasure theirs.