Bird Droppings August 5, 2025
Where is the passion?

About eight years ago, I was sitting facing a rising sun, thankful for a new day. A few days passed, and the first sunlight appeared as on many mornings. It was ironic as I was sitting on an overturned five-gallon plastic bucket next to a small circle of smooth river rocks facing east, listening to a mockingbird chattering away in the dawn light, thinking about the day ahead, and offering thanks before the day started. Behind me to the west was a setting moon I had seen before the cloud cover swept in and covered it. I could still imagine it as the sun rose and the moon set behind a cover of clouds. To my amazement, reds and oranges were streaking the gray lines of morning. The ambient temperature was a bit cold, about like today, and the local frog friends were not chirping in the morning air.

To my left, a squirrel made its way through the hedge row of sumac, wild cherry trees, and assorted brush, always wary of our red-tailed hawk that hunts our backyard. My medicine circle of river stones is almost covered with pine needles. The sycamore tree leaves have all fallen, and the white bark peeling offers interesting images in the faint morning light. Beside me to the right, a young live oak is always green, it seems, preceding winter’s loss. As I watched in almost a trance, the band of orange wandered into the day, widening and stretching across the horizon. I often wonder how many others sit and watch the day being born. If only my father used the term often in his teachings, and I in mine. So I am thankful to witness the wonder of this sunrise and to praise the day yet to come in Cherokee Wa de (Skee).

As I begin to think about my writing today, so many ideas and thoughts are sitting beside books and on the internet, waiting to be used and expounded on. I recall how, during school hours, I would hear the simple phrase from at least one student, “I hate school.” I usually hear it numerous times throughout the day. What I find amusing is that you very seldom hear this in kindergarten or elementary school, which is interesting. When and where does the attitude towards school change?

“How do preschool children, full of natural inquisitiveness and a passion for learning, turn into apathetic or angry teens with a profound dislike of school?” Robert L. Fried, The Passionate Learner

I remember my early grades, although that is now nearly sixty years ago. I remember a second-grade teacher who inspired us. I recall a teacher who made each day amazing and special, and you wanted to be there tomorrow to see what was next. But I also recall teachers who presented an image of a different sort, one where we did not want to be in school and where it was more fun to stay home and be “sick.” A recent reading of Henry David Thoreau added to Dana’s statement that Thoreau quit teaching to be a learner and found he was a far better teacher than he thought.

“The real difficulty, the difficulty which has baffled the sages of all times, is rather this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the motivational life of man that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic forces in the individual?” Albert Einstein

“Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” John Cotton Dana

For several years, I had ended my emails with this thought from Einstein. Just the other day, I mentioned to a fellow teacher that Einstein was equally a philosopher and a scientist, and most never would take the time to see that side of him. So I come back to how teachers can bring “passion” to their teaching, as Robert Fried writes about. How can we make teaching so potent, as Einstein states? I have come to find in the past few weeks that the teacher’s attitude is crucial to this process. It is not so much about approach as attitude. How a teacher interacts and responds to students in their class is far more important than the material taught. If a teacher is not getting through to the students, the material is inconsequential.

“The most important part of education,” once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher ‘is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him.” Sydney J. Harris

Artificially, we draw out great schemes and plans and build a fabulous curriculum. In education classes, teachers learn how to do lesson plans, study the ins and outs of lesson plans, and learn various curriculum philosophical theories and rationales, and they get credit for this. This is a major portion of the structure of teaching teachers. State education departments have, for example, various curriculum guidelines and standards that determine what content needs to be covered in this course or grade. Of course, in Georgia, we even have the notorious End of Course Tests. I have seen teachers agonize over not covering the standards in the time given daily to meet the demands of the test.

“WHEN most people think of the word ‘education,’ they think of a pupil as a sort of animate sausage casing. Into this empty casing, the teachers are supposed to stuff ‘education.’” Sydney J. Harris

It is the teacher who teaches by stuffing that adds to the dilemma we face when we encounter students who do not care and are disinterested in school. I remember a teacher a year or so ago who was so frustrated because they could not cover pages 1 through 546 in the time given. This teacher was near a nervous breakdown, and really, what if those students were not able to get through the material? What if they were having functional difficulty? How and why should we teach beyond that point where they are struggling with what they already know?

“But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffing of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind,” Sydney J Harris.

How do we become the teacher who draws out rather than simply stuffs in?

“The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Those who know how to think need no teachers.” Mahatma Gandhi

Teaching becomes more about showing how to think and process than content. Education, to have any meaning beyond the purpose of creating well-informed dunces, must elicit from the pupil what is latent in every human being – the rules of reason, the inner knowledge of what is proper for men to be and do, the ability to sift evidence and come to conclusions that can generally be assented to by all open minds and warm hearts.” Sydney J. Harris

Over the past twenty-five years that I have come back to teaching, I have found a hierarchy of teachers. It seems there are three types of teachers. There are parasites; these are those who use such great statements as “This is my classroom” and “You will respect me.” As we evolve, if we do as teachers, we become symbiotic. This is where both the teacher and student are independent of each other, yet need each other to coexist, and teachers now say things like, “How can I help you?” In any progression, there is always room for growth. For several years, I thought this was where teaching’s endpoint was in a symbiotic relationship. However, I was sitting in a class, and another idea, an epiphany, hit me. Osmosis is taking down walls, and then learning becomes as it should, fluid; it moves and reacts in that fluid manner, and both the teacher and student are learning and teaching in a reciprocating way. John Dewey talked about this over a hundred years ago and was considered progressive. Interestingly enough, I should say sadly enough, that he is still considered progressive.

“Pupils are more like oysters than sausages. The job of teaching is not to stuff them and then seal them up but to help them open and reveal the riches within. There are pearls in each of us if only we knew how to cultivate them with ardor and persistence.” Sydney J. Harris

It isn’t easy to get to this point. Few colleges for teachers teach in this manner. Those that do are few and far between. In my educational travels, I have met several university professors who believe in this and teach it. Hopefully, as the future rolls around, more teachers will rise and take notice of how many students hate school and maybe try to do something. Sitting here on a beautiful morning in Georgia, wondering about the day, I am excited as questions flow in and new teachers ask for guidance. Please, as the day rolls on, keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts, and please always give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
docbird