student + teacher = happiness

As many folks around the world tiptoe back to school, my thoughts are in gratitude for all the teachers out there. We are homeschoolers, yes, and we wrote in Resilience Parenting that parents can be the very best of teachers, yes. But, as we were reminded while hunkering down in spring and summer, our education depends a lot on other teachers too!

From day to day, a whole host of mentors supplements our stated family mission: ‘a quest to explore the world inside and outside ourselves.’ These partners in education are the librarians, the museum curators, the family members, the fellow educators, the artists, and the workshop leaders that we seek out to inspire curiosity and keep our spirit of learning aflame.

Never before Covid-19 have we faced the challenge of educating our children without this partnership.

Do you know the feeling of not realizing how thirsty you are until you take a drink? Upon tasting the sweetness of water in a desert-dry mouth, you then find yourself gulping it down, and you can feel the very life of it spreading throughout you. I know no better way to describe how I felt, after months of keeping to ourselves, when standing next to (safe distance, of course) a gifted teacher in the outdoor classroom of a city walking tour.

Mr. Andrew Butterworth was our guide in the city of Bath, England, in late July. We were lucky to find this master teacher, more fortunate still to be his first walking tour in months. We needed each other! After all, a teacher without a student is just as joyless as a student without a teacher.

Andrew memorized our boys’ names within minutes, then turned to the middle one (who never gets the right sort of attention), asked him a question (refusing to let his brothers answer for him), and waited patiently for the answer. I rejoiced! His attention to our children as individuals and enthusiasm for their curiosity was thrilling. Best of all, he knew to pick topics with just the right amount of guts and gore to keep young boys interested. (Do you know what it means to spend a penny?)

The joy of uniting teacher with students was palpably vibrant. Those first five minutes standing next to an enthusiastic champion of education, in the flesh, nearly brought me to tears. (I assume you can always tell which of us is writing these posts by whether there are overpowering emotions or effusively snarky comments—I’ll let you sort that out.)

With Andrew’s help, we took our first steps into places of the outside world in which people were eagerly awaiting to teach us something. And wow, did he ever convert us to believe in the value of a private tour guide! It’s like having a city be transformed before our eyes into a living museum, where stones laid and metal shaped by human hands become characters in a dramatic play of life centuries gone. Andrew illuminated the dealings of Romans and Roundheads in Bath. Rosemary clued us into murderous plots in Salisbury. Linda taught about Shakespeare’s youth and living legacy in Stratford Upon Avon, and Daniel told stories of Scottish heroes like Robert Burns and Robert the Bruce in Edinburgh.

I shan’t forget to mention, too, all the museums! How sad they were, encased in cobwebs and guarded by weeds and the detritus of unswept corners. At long last, the locks came off, the doors creaked open, and we were welcomed to feast again on this staple of our educational sustenance. It started with a tiny collection of daily life antiquities in South Molton, in a space no bigger than a living room, lovingly curated by volunteers.

That was just the beginning. Then we moved to the majestic setting of HMS Great Britain in Bristol, where sights, sounds, and smells recreated the sensations of sailing across the Atlantic. A crop circle museum outside of Pewsey electrified the boys’ interest for mysteries. At Old Sarum, an ancient crumbling castle raised numerous questions about life at the royal Norman court.

In all these places, the docents were full of energy to answer those questions and zealously share what they knew. That’s the essential equation of learning, isn’t it? Discovering something that makes you curious and then finding the mentor to answer that curiosity? It’s a chorus of call and response that sets the learning soul singing.

As school reconvenes, I hope that we all get to feel the thrill of being with another person who shares a passion for education and is simply bursting to share it. Teachers and students are meant to be together. Whether it is now or soon, in person or virtually, students and teachers—of all kinds—need each other.

Thanks to all the folks dedicated to education, we appreciate you now more than ever!