In the 1980s, when I attended high school at Alhambra here on the west side of Phoenix, I had an amazing teacher for three of my classes: Mrs. Janet Moore. She taught sophomore and senior level English, and also the Humanities course I took in senior year. Though she passed away years ago, I can’t express how much she meant (and still means) to me.
One of Mrs. Moore’s gifts was to bring a sense of humanity and richness to our learning experiences. Whether it was encouraging us to explore alternative texts for our essays, or providing enrichment resources, she was always a gentle soul who made learning fun, and placed our lessons within the broader human context.
One day in Humanities class we were discussing the different attitudes toward discursive thought, as expressed in some Western and Eastern philosophies. Without “othering” Asian cultures, Mrs. Moore introduced and mediated discussions on the richness of views of meditation, koans, satori and kensho, and instruction through parables. She contrasted these with ideals of discursive thought and disputation, and placed them beside concepts of “Being” from Aristotle and Heidegger. In the context of this discussion, she recounted a Zen koan – which I later learned was told about the Zen master Hakuin – that went roughly like this:
One day, a warrior traveled far and climbed a tall mountain to speak to a venerable monk to learn the secrets of the afterlife. When he arrived, he approached the old man meditating in his garden, and asked him “Tell me, sage: where are the Gates to Heaven and Hell?”
At this, the monk opened his eyes to look at the warrior, and said “Who are you to ask about the Gates of Paradise? You look like a beggar!”
Angry with the insult to his pride, the warrior drew his sword and held it to the chest of the seated monk. “You will answer me, or I will kill you!” he shouted.
At this, the old monk said calmly “Here open the Gates to Hell.”
The warrior, taken aback by this, was silent for a moment. He then sheathed his sword as he calmed, recognizing the discipline of the sage.
The monk then smiled and said “Here open the Gates to Heaven.”
To this day, almost exactly forty years later, I still recall vividly the long, awed silence that persisted in class after Mrs. Moore spoke the final line of the koan. It has endured in my consciousness and resurfaced many, many times since then.
I mention this because the theme for today’s post is “Portals and Thresholds”. Mrs. Moore exemplifies the ideal educator for me, in the way she was constantly opening portals into new ways of thinking, and gently guiding us to those thresholds of learning and expanding our understanding. When I think of a model of the kind of educator I want to be, she is the epitome. And this koan beautifully illustrates the opportunity each of us has, in any given moment, to choose by our actions to open a portal that is constructive or destructive, and of meeting each student where they are, and differentiating our pedagogy to their respective needs so that each may walk through that portal without hindrance.
I try to apply Mrs. Moore’s modeling in my instructional area of Chemistry, a field which may not immediately strike many as synonymous with empathy and the human-centered dimensions of knowledge. Or at least, not in the way that, for example, the arts or humanities fields might. Our tendency in the STEM fields is sometimes to focus more on the precision, the exactitude, and the processes and the systems of our work – that is, the more cognitive components – and give less attention to the equally important affective, social, and behavioral components of learning (as well as practicing) in our fields. The arts do a much better job of this than we do in STEM, frankly.
It’s not to say we STEM instructors are unempathetic. My colleagues are some of the most empathetic people I know! Rather, I would argue that we have models of instruction that we have all learned which emphasize more strongly the cognitive components of learning, such that the affective, social and behavioral components sometimes have to be grafted on after the fact. And this grafting-on sometimes only happens once we engage in significant professional development and self-interrogation.
The way I teach Chemistry today is sometimes quite different from how I learned it from some of my Old School professors and teachers. In the 1980s, most of my college professors were in their late middle-age. Most of them had gone to college in the 1950s and were taught by professors who had themselves attended college in the 1920s. It showed, with some taking a “sink or swim” attitude with their students. (Worse, I also saw one tear up students’ papers in front of class, shout at their students, and throw erasers and chalk, upbraiding them in front of the class, and so forth. All abusive behaviors, but which were rather more acceptable “back in the day”.) Others were not abusive like this, but were merely distant and aloof. A pervasive attitude seemed to be that it was the professor’s responsibility to provide the structured content expertise, and the student’s responsibility to provide everything else, including the emotional engagement with the learning experience.
Don’t get me wrong: some of my professors were more engaged. A couple were even excellent! And students absolutely have to bring their own intrinsic motivation and executive function to the learning process. But effective instructors have a greater responsibility than just providing structured content expertise. We must also exercise appropriate affective engagement. Pedagogical soundness and excellence sometimes requires we be coaches, nurturers, facilitators, and gentle guides who – while championing academic rigor and integrity – also recognize that we do not work in a vacuum, and students bring their lives with them into our classroom. The notion that they should just “leave all that outside” is unrealistic.
This is particularly true when our students are experiencing so many challenges, one of the most pernicious of which is socioeconomic disadvantage. Having grown up as a first generation student in a poor household led, for much of my youth, by a single mom, this is particularly resonant for me. Unless someone has experienced this for themselves, it may be difficult to imagine how pervasive the impacts are for a student doing their best to manage home, work, and school under financial precarity. We hear about some students who may have been evicted from their homes, or who have a parent in prison, or who have to work two jobs while attending college, or who have difficulty affording child care, or transportation, or groceries, or medicine. But unless you have lived that life, it may be impossible to fully appreciate just how ground down this makes you feel, and how hard even the simplest things become. These challenges absolutely do not sit and wait at the threshold of the learning experience; rather, they are integral to the student’s experience of their world entire, and cannot be extricated from their learning.
So I am thankful that we, as a profession – and particularly in the community college context this is the case – have embraced a much more intentionally holistic approach to student engagement, which goes far beyond simply “providing expert content knowledge in a structured format”. Rather, we engage in helping lead students to the thresholds of learning, even when that means we need to differentiate our approach to meet their particular needs. When we find ourselves turning a blind eye to student needs or systemic disadvantage, even when it is in a well-intentioned effort to provide a “neutral” learning experience, we passively participate in an unjust system. There, I believe, open the Gates to Hell. But when we take it as part of our responsibility as educators to understand and work in appropriate ways to ameliorate the inequities that our students experience, there open the Gates to Heaven.
Well, I’m still searching for the Gates to Heaven as an educator. But every time I find myself empathizing with my students, respecting their individuality and trying to understand their perspectives and adapting to their needs – while maintaining the academic rigor of my teaching – I feel like I get a little glimpse of it. Every time I try to bring in the human dimensions of Chemistry, whether it is to reflect on climate impact, the geopolitical ramifications of sourcing raw materials, ideas in the philosophy of science, the intersectionality of race and gender in the historical practice of the sciences, or other relevant social dimensions, I feel like I present new thresholds for my students to gain deeper understanding of Chemistry in their lives and in the world beyond simply “can you solve this equation” or “can you name this compound”. And in so doing, I feel like I approach a little closer to the platonic ideal of what a chemistry course could be.
As I am now in the final decade of my career, I find that this is the area in which I am most excited to develop as an educator, and as a human being sharing this journey with you all.
And I wish I could talk about all this with Mrs. Moore today.
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