“Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service, figuring that if you are doing the sort of work that Bono celebrates then you must be a good person… In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests.” ~ David Brooks, “The Service Patch” (24 May 2012)
I have been fascinated to discover the difference between
the statements, “I teach high school English” (Oh. Did you make the mistake of majoring in poetry?) and “I’m
doing Teach for America” (Cool!
That’s a really good thing to do).
Oddly enough, my students never seemed to care how or why I became a teacher; I have learned from them just how much who I am matters – or more broadly, how
important character is in any field.
This was, in fact, the initial brilliance of Teach for America –
recognizing that at least part of the problem in education was a human capital
problem, that there was an undersupply (please do not read “no supply”) of
qualified and quality teachers. While
many people were focused on reworking curricula or improving
testing/accountability, Kopp recognized what E.M. Bounds once observed about
ministry: “The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better
men.”
As a generation (even as a culture?) we have defined
“better” as based on community service.
To some extent, I understand the movement towards positive action in
place of the simple negative avoidance that accompanied previous moral
fervor. As a pastor-friend, Dan Orr,
once observed during a similar discussion, “We will never be a witness for our
beliefs by what we don’t do in our
work;” people seldom notice the absence of insult or injury. And yet it is hard to serve without some
belief driving us.
So the real litmus test becomes: how deep does that belief
go? No matter the type of job we are
working, how authentic are we? The fact
that I was “serving” erased neither my desire for a beer after a rough day, nor
the obvious query on students’ faces if they saw me purchasing it at the local
market: “I guess that education he
preaches doesn’t land you that far
from the reality I know.” As John
Poulton observed, “People communicate primarily, not words or ideas…
Authenticity gets across from deep down inside people… A momentary insincerity
can cast doubt on all that has made for communication up to that point.” Inversely, that same authenticity can
communicate positively. I never saw
growth from KJ while I taught him, but after we developed a relationship
through athletics/coaching, he ended up working – on his own time - many of the
same reading, ACT prep, and time management lessons that he had not previously! Q. started the year with an underwhelming 6th-grade
reading level and an overwhelming attitude, but after I visited her family and
attended the funeral following her brother’s untimely death, her performance
tipped and she grew 5 years in reading that year. Nothing about teaching itself
demanded that I have these relationships; it was not simply where I worked or
what I did that created these impacts.