Chapter IThe Heart of a TeacherIdentity and Integrity in TeachingNow I become myself. It's takenTime, many years and places;I have been dissolved and shaken,Worn other people's faces ...•MAY SARTON, "Now I BECOME MYSELF"'TEACHING BEYOND TECHNIQUENot long before I started this book, as summer took a slow turn to-ward fall, I walked into a college classroom and into my third decadeof teaching.I went to class that day grateful for another chance to teach;teaching engages my soul as much as any work I know. But I camehome that evening convinced once again that I will never master thisbaffling vocation. Annoyed with some of my students and embar-rassed by my own blunders, I pondered a recurring question: Mightit be possible, at my age, to find a new line of work, maybe evensomething I know how to do?The students in my first section were silent as monks. Despitemy shameless pleading, I could not buy a response from them, and Isoon found myself sinking into one of my oldest phobias: I must bevery boring to anesthetize, so quickly, these young people who onlymoments earlier had been alive with hallway chatter.In the second section they talked, but the talk flared into con-flict as one student insisted that the concerns of another student were"petty" and did not deserve attention. I masked my irritation andurged open listening to diverse views, but the air was already polluted,and the dialogue died. That, of course, sank me into another ancientangst: how awkward I am at dealing with conflict when my studentsdecide to start talking!I have taught thousands of students, attended many seminarson teaching, watched others teach, read about teaching, and reflectedon my own experience. My stockpile of methods is substantial. Butwhen I walk into a new class, it is as if I am starting over. My prob-lems are perennial, familiar to all teachers. Still, they take me by sur-prise, and my responses to them—though outwardly smoother witheach year—feel almost as fumbling as they did when I was a novice.After three decades of trying to learn my craft, every classcomes down to this: my student^ and I, face to face, engaged in anancient and exacting exchange called education. The techniques Ihave mastered do not disappear, but neither do they suffice. Face toface with my students, only one resource is at my immediate com-mand: my identity, my selfhood, my sense of this "I" who teaches—without which I have no sense of the "Thou" who learns.This book builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot bereduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrityof the teacher.The premise is simple, but its implications are not. It will taketime to unfold what I do and do not mean by those words. But hereis one way to put it: in every class I teach, my ability to connect withmy students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less onthe methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust myselfhood—and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in theservice of learning.My evidence for this claim comes, in part, from years of askingstudents to tell me about their good teachers. Listening to those stories,it becomes impossible to claim that all good teachers use similar tech-niques: some lecture nonstop and others speak very little; some stayclose to their material and others loose the imagination; some teachwith the carrot and others with the stick.But in every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: astrong sense of personal identity infuses their work. "Dr. A is reallythere when she teaches," a student tells me, or "Mr. B has such enthu-siasm for his subject," or "You can tell that this is really Prof. C's life."10THE COURAGE TO TEACHOne student I heard about said she could not describe her goodteachers because they differed so greatly, one from another. But shecould describe her bad teachers because thef were all the same:"Their words float somewhere in front of their faces, like the balloonspeech in cartoons."With one remarkable image she said it all. Bad teachers dis-tance themselves from the subject they are teaching—and in theprocess, from their students. Good teachers join self and subject andstudents in the fabric of life.Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They areable to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, theirsubjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave aworld for themselves. The methods used by these weavers varywidely: lectures, Socratic dialogues, laboratory experiments, collab-orative problem solving, creative chaos. The connections made bygood teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts—meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect andemotion and spirit and will converge in the human self.As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with stu-dents and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads aretied, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretchedtight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens theheart, even breaks the heart—and the more one loves teaching, themore heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage tokeep one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is askedto hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subjectcan be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living,require.If teaching cannot be reduced to technique, it is both good newsand bad. The good news is that we no longer need suffer the bore-dom many of us feel when teaching is approached as a question of"how to do it." We rarely talk with each other about teaching at anydepth—and why should we when we have nothing more than "tips,tricks, and techniques" to discuss? That kind of talk fails to touchthe heart of a teacher's experience.The good news gets even better. If teaching cannot be reducedto technique, I no longer need suffer the pain of having my peculiargift as a teacher crammed into the Procrustean bed of someone else's11The Heart of a Teachermethod and the standards prescribed by it. That pain is felt through-out education today as we glorify the method dujour, leaving peoplewho teach differently feeling devalued, forcing them to measure upto norms not their own.I will never forget one professor who, moments before I was tostart a workshop on teaching, unloaded years of pent-up workshopanimus on me: "I am an organic chemist. Are you going to spend thenext two days