Home > Work > The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
1 " Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known. "
― Parker J. Palmer , The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
2 " Alice Kaplan is a teacher of French language and literature, and she has done this kind of remembering in a book called French Lessons. “Why do people want to adopt another culture?” she asks as she summarizes her journey into teaching and into life. “Because there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them.”5 "
3 " This book is for teachers who have good days and bad and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves... when you love your work that much, and many teachers do, the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in. "
4 " Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. "
5 " I want to learn how to hold the paradoxical poles of my identity together, to embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is deeply dependent on others dancing with me and that I still have a sense of self when no one wants to dance. "
6 " The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference. "
7 " By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am. "
8 " If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract. "
9 " Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive. "
10 " As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. "
11 " Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination. "
12 " Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. "
13 " we cannot see what is “out there” merely by looking around. Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible. "
14 " good teaching cannot be reduced to technique,- good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. "
15 " Long into my career I harbored a secret sense that thinking and reading and writing, as much as I loved them, did not qualify as "real work. "
16 " Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student. "
17 " When I forget my own inner multiplicity and my own long and continuing journey toward selfhood, my expectations of students become excessive and unreal. If I can remember the inner pluralism of my own soul and the slow pace of my own self-emergence, I will be better able to serve the pluralism among my students at the pace of their young lives. "
18 " Good teaching is an act of hospitality toward the young, and hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when this reciprocity was easier to see: in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend—thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host. It is that way in teaching as well: the teacher’s hospitality to the student results in a world more hospitable to the teacher. "
19 " Every profession that attracts people for “reasons of the heart” is a profession in which people and the work they do suffer from losing heart. Like teachers, these people are asking, “How can we take heart again so that we can give heart to others?”—which is why they undertook their work in the first place. "
20 " does it mean to listen to a voice before it is "