Everyone On The Train

The issue of loving the work had come up a few times already this week when this article turned up on my screen.

You may remember the story from 2017. A white supremacist threatens two girls on the Portland rail; three men intervene, and he attacks them with a knife. The youngest of the three, Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, was stabbed fatally. As he lay dying in another passenger's arms, he said, "Tell everyone on this train I love them." The article writer picks up there:

These beautiful words stopped me in my tracks when I first heard them. They gave me a directive, a way of being. At my best moments, this stranger’s last words guided where I looked, how I acted, and what I chose to do with my time.

Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche’s mother describes her son’s last words as “the most important thing in the whole process”. Taliesin’s father says that when he heard what his son said, “It was literally a saving grace for me.” They were a saving grace for me, too: they changed my life.

Loving everyone on the train meant I could love people I didn’t yet know. What Taliesin said felt instinctually correct to me yet was simultaneously baffling. It often seems there are impossibly huge chasms between me and others, so how could I love them?

Early in my career, I had a superintendent who liked to tell a story at the beginning of every year. It was a story about a rancher talking to some new horse trainers, and quizzing them about what the very first step in training a horse. They took turns answering and this part of the story changed every year because it didn't really matter--all their guesses about bridles and first skills to train were all wrong. "First," the rancher said, "first, you have to love the horse."

It's not a perfect story (students aren't untrained horses), but the point was clear enough and while we joked about it, we also got it. Caring about the students is the foundation of everything else. 

Not that you need to be all mooshy or syrupy--love and care take a lot of forms, and some of them are rather dry and direct. But the foundation of teaching is care. You teach students to read because you care whether they can read or not. You can teach them a particular skill or piece of knowledge because it's what you're paid to do, or because your boss ordered you to, I suppose, but there's little chance of hiding from the students that you are simply acting out of obligation or coercion rather than genuine care, and it will make you less effective. 

It is certainly one of the hard parts of the gig, because some students can make it awfully hard to care about them. Or maybe it's more honest and fair to say that you and certain students come together in ways that aren't very conducive to a caring relationship. Nor do I mean that you need to be every student's friend, or even that you need to be close--it's hugely important to respect students' boundaries instead. Like everything that matters in education, balance matters. And it's hard to transfer the skill--I am a master of analogizing things, but there is no relationship analogous to the relationship between a teacher and a student.

But here's a big thing I believe about love--it's not so much a feeling as an action and a choice, a commitment (I learned this sort of thing by going through the meltdown of my previous marriage, but smarter people than I have figured it out with less wear and tear). You can choose to love people, and you can do it based on who you are instead of waiting to be inspired by who they are. 

You can choose to love all the people on the train.

This is important these days, because twenty years of modern reform and especially two years of pandemess and CRT panic have worked to drive love and trust out of schools. Since (at least) A Nation at Risk, critics have deliberately ignored and abused the notion that teachers might choose to teach out of love and care, but must instead be threatened with Consequences. From No Child Left Behind through various gag laws, the whispered accusation has been that teachers just don't care about kids, don't care if they learn, don't care if they fail. Some have sold us a model of children as not-yet-people, empty vessels that need to be filled and conditioned and engineered into usefulness, not loved into full humanity. 

All across the political spectrum, we've been sold a grim and loveless picture of schools. Schools are twisted tangles of social issues, of Problems and Deficiencies. Schools are hopeless failures where most fail to learn and teachers only care about using students as indoctrinated tools. Schools stink. Schools are failing. Nothing good or decent or bright or kind or happy is there, and in fact, according to some, that is furthest from the purpose of Whipping Them Into Shape, or training them to be useful meat widgets, to take their rightful place upon the treadmill in pursuit of wages. 

Look, I am the last person to suggest that a big hug and a nice chorus of Kum-Bay-Yah are all we need to make the world right again. Love without works is empty. Caring about people without trying to lift them up is just virtue signaling into your own mirror. And telling someone to practice self-care is pretty much an open admission that they had better care about themselves because you don't; toxic positivity sucks, and I don't want to go there, either.

But caring about the work, loving the horse--that's the foundation of everything else. That means not only does it keep the building straight and upright, but it provides strength and support when the storm is raging. And it is certainly okay to go back to that caring at the heart of the work and revisit it, let it warm you, and remind yourself that it's real, regardless of what the world seems to be telling you. 

The love at the heart of the work doesn't mean you have to use yourself up (I hate that damn candle meme thingy). But it is at the heart of the work. Don't lose your heart, and let it remind you what is bright and beautiful about the work, even when the storm rages. So much of the rhetoric surrounding education (and I'm at fault sometimes myself) encourages us to see it as small and petty and meagre, crabbed figures in a cramped ledger; it's love that helps us remember that the work is bigger than all of us, bigger than everyone on the train.