You Gave Me Permission to Be Me

Evaluations of teachers always miss the most important, most valuable, fact about a truly good teacher.

And that is the fact that the student whose mind has caught fire senses that he somehow did it himself.

The good teacher has allowed the student to be what he natively is, to recover the curiosity and interest in discovery with which he was born, before it got squelched by the traditional educational institutions' obedience training and carrot/stick manipulation.

Carl Roger's book, “Client-Centered Therapy,” uses a quote from Emerson right on the first page that captures this to some degree, although in a different context. The breakthrough feels more like a recovery of something we always deeply were inside than something from outside that a teacher stuffed into us.

“We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were.” -Emerson, Divinity School Address, 1838

Another consequence of this is that the good teacher himself will often not realize that he is a great teacher. Not only the official evaluators, but the good teachers themselves, may never know when the true education is going on. I've had one or two of my students say to me, years later, that the essence of it was “You gave me permission to be me.” But the student will probably never even speak of what happened, perhaps not having the words to express it. And the typical “teacher evaluation instruments?” Just forget it. Completely clueless.