The Courage to Teach

  Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach has been a very insightful and strengthening book as I have been reading it, seeking to learn more about teaching. If we imagine teaching as both a science and an art, the author speaks more to the art side, the heart side. Certainly there are other perspectives that might balance his, but what he presents is quite beautiful.

  So much of what Palmer says rings true to the greater human experience, not simply to the vocation of teaching. He speaks of what it means to have a vocation, what it means to change, and what it means to interact deeply with those who see or have experienced the world in ways different from how you have. I hope these extracts interest you in his book.

... Frederick Buechner offers a more generous and humane image of vocation as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” In a culture that sometimes equates work with suffering, it is revolutionary to suggest that the best inward sign of vocation is deep gladness— revolutionary but true. If a work is mine to do, it will make me glad over the long haul, despite the difficult days. Even the difficult days will ultimately gladden me, because they pose the kinds of problems that can help me grow in a work if it is truly mine.

In classical understanding, education is the attempt to “lead out” from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination. The inward teacher is the living core of our lives that is addressed and evoked by any education worthy of the name.

...the self is not a scrap of turf to be defended but a capacity to be enlarged.

Otherness, taken seriously, always invites transformation, calling us not only to new facts and theories and values but also to new ways of living our lives— and that is the most daunting threat of all.

(Palmer, Parker J. . The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life (p. 31, 32, 39). Emphases mine.