When thoughts turn to the fall semester. I miss the students and the pace, however hectic, of the academic year. A few lines from the classic book, The Courage to Teach, (P.J. Palmer, 1998) seem appropriate. Perhaps some readers are getting ready for this too?
I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illuminated by the lightening-life of the mind – then teaching is the finest work I know.
But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused – and I am so powerless to do anything about it – that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool was I to imagine that I had mastered this occult art – harder to divine than tea leaves and impossible for mortals to do even passably well! (pp. 1-2). [snip]
After three decades of trying to learn my craft, every class comes down to this: my students and I, face to face, engaged in an ancient and exacting exchange called education. The techniques I have mastered do not disappear, but neither do they suffice. Face to face with my students, only one resource is at my immediate command: my identity, my selfhood, my sense of this “I” who teaches – without which I have no sense of the “Thou” who learns (p. 10).
Praxis in Landscape Architecture 