Allan Appel photo
Panelists Rev. Dr. Dan Heischman, Valerie Mara, and Salman Hamid.
Here’s a hypothetical: You’re a teacher thrown into a class mid-semester and you have to choose in those first high-anxiety days between prioritizing learning a curriculum utterly new to you or learning the (yipes!) 27 students’ names.
What to do?
Answer: Choose the names, and where each student sits in the room, and maybe some biographical info about each.
Why? Because, as a wise wag (sometimes attributed to Teddy Roosevelt) once said: No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
That view as pedagogical advice emerged Tuesday night in a candid and bracing teacher-to-teacher panel discussion titled “Teaching as a Spiritual Practice.”
The convener was the Eckhart Center at Albertus Magnus College. The event drew a dozen educators in person and many more via Zoom to the school’s Behan Community Room at the western end of the campus near Winchester Avenue.
The purveyor of that counsel was Salman Hamid, the assistant principal at the Kelly STEAM Magnet Middle School in Norwich. He was joined by Rev. Daniel Heischman, who teaches at the Yale Divinity School and, before retirement, supervised the National Association of Episcopal Schools. The third panelist was Valerie Mara, superintendent of the schools in the Archdiocese of Hartford.
The context of discussion was often the practice of teaching in a religion-based school where God can be invoked without a Board of Ed hassle — that is, defining teaching as a vocation where one is answering a call to service, as in the Latin root, vocare, meaning to call, and how to stay in touch with the tenets of one’s faith during the stresses of a teaching career.
Nevertheless, there were also many insights and tips for anyone who spends her or his life with students.
The Eckhart Center’s director Prof. Edward Dunar set the stage:
“Teaching, at heart,” he said, “at whatever setting or level, is a practice of relationships, and that’s what makes it fundamentally spiritual with an eye to the growth of another, and the community.”
How, he asked his panelists, might that understanding be deepened?
Kids are so disconnected these days, replied Valerie Mara, their brains vulnerable and yet distracted and disserved by social media. They need not a new program or a new drug but, above all, connection.
A teacher’s spiritual practice can be, she added, to help them learn to connect to one another, to sense there is something out there greater than themselves, and to feel unconditionally loved every day.
“Teaching has some suffering in it,” replied Rev. Heischman (to knowing laughter from the audience), “and suffering is a spiritual practice.”
By suffering he didn’t mean your salary or a child biting you, but the constant thinking that a teacher does about how the day went: Did the kids get the lesson? Where did I go wrong? How can I improve? That’s a positive kind of suffering.
“If we’re not suffering [in that sense], then we lose our edge.”
He also said it helps to remind yourself that each and every child a teacher confronts is also a “spiritual being” and one’s expectations or assumptions about the students affects profoundly how they are taught.
Other advice included: Keep asking questions. Questions in many ways are more important than answers in a teaching practice.
And also, Heischman advised, do not be afraid of silence. Silence is good. Silence is the time that students may be thinking, ideas percolating. Do not go nuts if you have asked a question and there is resounding silence. Silence at times can be your assistant teacher.
Dunar concluded the panel by asking, “How do you create faith values in different settings — public as well as religious schools?”
“In the vocation of teaching,” Heischman responded, “we need to welcome other claims to truth [in the classroom] while holding to one’s own. Pluralism is not the same as relativism. We need to learn from traditions not our own while being authentic to ourselves.”
And, responding to palpable if unexpressed anxiety in the panel’s listeners, he added: “In a pluralistic world, we are often afraid to make mistakes. We are going to make mistakes in a pluralistic context,” and that’s okay.
For upcoming events at the Eckhart Center, click here.