By Dr. Jacob Kaltenbach

Stories from teaching and other vocations can help educators reflect on successes and failures in simply treating students as human beings. Examples from students’ reading and critical thinking show they are compelled to affirm their humanity by drawing connections to life outside school. In the interest of building patience and becoming more effective listeners, faculty are encouraged to do the same. Offered with apologies to Bob Dylan.

Once upon a time, I was an electrician’s apprentice on an unsafe jobsite. The first lesson was how to avoid dying. All the circuits should have been cold, but some held a charge we couldn’t turn off. The journeyman taught me how to check and check again, and how to dive out of the way when an electrified metal snake arced out of the conduit, its metal glowing hot against the desert sky. He taught me how to keep my peripheral vision open and how to roll to safety when heavy equipment fell off ledges. I was wondering what else to do with my life and talked about getting a degree. The journeyman told me he dropped out of high school three credits short. He just walked out of school one day after the English teacher insulted him and his friends. He didn’t feel safe there either. He didn’t feel seen. The next lesson is that people can succeed without us.

I used to teach modern Russian literature at one of those schools that declared itself the finest. The students came from all over and didn’t know why they were there. I handed them books of stories about people’s lives in the 20^th century. Tanya and Rob rarely came to class and the dean warned them they might fail. I offered them a private tutorial, and I asked them to bring their books. We were reading Ludmila Ulitskaya’s tale of the lifelong reader Sonechka, who had lovingly installed her large, oddball family in a crumbling house where she could daily amaze her husband at “how much their long talks in the night revealed his past to him in a quite new and different light” (1992, p. 22).

Rob was a silent type. He worked construction in the summers. I could never get him to talk in class, but on the way out of class, we sometimes talked about building work. He thought Ulitskaya had actually written a novel about a building. The house gradually fell apart along with the other constructions of Sonechka’s life, “bereft of its residents, its windows broken, scarred by minor fires caused by youthful arsonists … empty and unused for many years …. affording shelter only to stray dogs and stray people” (1992, p. 96). This was the house of Sonechka’s dreams, where she could serve stewed fruit and hear the creaks of her people going about their business. In the end, Rob thought, she was a person unresolved, an analogue of her own crumbling house. In fact, she identified directly with the building, with its “sighing and gasping … in the night, as the old become aware of their bodies becoming ever more alien with the passing years” (Ulitskaya, 1992, p. 79). Like Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Rob suddenly realized, almost punching the air, that’s the only story he remembered from high school.

Tanya had two revelations for me. One, she had never before been assigned and had never read a novel from cover to cover. Two, she was skipping classes because she felt stupid. At seminar, everyone else had so much to say, and it all sounded so smart. But ah, I realized, and I told her: those kids just repeated the best ideas from the book reviews. “I just read the book,” she said, and so I asked her what she thought. She thought that Sonechka was like a genius at reading, how she could almost bring fictional characters to life around her, but then she worried that doing this made her too accepting of real people’s flaws even when they abused her, because she just saw them from the outside like fictional characters. Like her mom, she said.

Tanya and Rob both persisted and succeeded. Rob came by office hours once before he graduated. “I wanted to thank you,” he said, “you’re the only teacher who ever treated me like a human being.” That amazed me as a young teacher. Could there really be other teachers who didn’t? Of course, Rob’s is one student review I like to brag about, and yes, I just did. But after almost 30 years, his words have become a cautionary echo in my head. Because now, if I’m honest, I know I haven’t treated every student like a human being — not like I should have. We hope we never compromise our values as educators, but we are also human beings. We get busy. People we love die. Things inside of us die. We drive through tunnels in our lives and have tunnel vision. We hit road blocks. We also feel stupid sometimes. We hit mental and financial rough spots. The bottom falls out, and we become withdrawn. We take shortcuts. We are conditioned to read and reread, to weigh, and to judge so completely that sometimes we can’t listen.

To genuinely listen, we need patience and strength. That means also treating ourselves as human beings: self-care, self-compassion, long or short restorative breaks as circumstances allow. Coderre (2023) asks us to teach our students that self-care is never selfish. If we are to remind them, as Coderre suggests, that sometimes “they don’t need to feel guilty about not working” (p. 3), we would do well to remember that the same is true for us. Without a universe beyond teaching, we’ll lose sight of those essential, different points of view, even our own. And in the formula offered by Hoveid and Hoveid (2009), actively being human requires affirmations greater than simply being and thinking: we must also speak, act, and tell.

The prison educator Friesen reflects that in any context, education may be best “conducted in the language of human being” (2022, p. 257). The vocabulary, references, concepts, and paradigms from our students’ lives – and from their jobs as builders, cooks, lawyers, electricians, carpenters, soldiers, first responders, research assistants, parents, children, and spouses – matter as much as those in our textbooks and online courses. If we listen closely, we can keep assignment requirements and research expectations adaptable. We can leave room for students to draw connections between course material and their own lives. Does peer-reviewed scholarship matter? Of course. But sometimes students can find the tools they really need to open and understand a new text or subject in their own vocational and interpersonal experiences – even, perhaps, in a favorite song. I had failed to give Tanya and Rob this space in the classroom. Once I offered it in the tutorial, they were astute enough to take it. All students should know, however, that they can think, speak, act, and tell without begging permission.

Like any human being.

References

Coderre, E.L. (2023). Teaching compassion. National Teaching and Learning Forum, 33(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1002/ntlf.30385

Friesen, H.L. (2022). We are all human beings. International Journal for Talent Development and Creativity, 10(1–2), 257–265.

Hoveid, M.H. & Hoveid, H. (2009). Educational practice and development of human capabilities. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28(5), 461–472. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9124-8

Ulitskaya, L. (1992). Sonechka, in Sonechka and Other Stories (A. Tait, Trans., pp.  7-97). Glas, 1998.