A little girl peers into the sky. She is sitting with her grandfather on a bench in the park. She sees a creature that is hovering above – blue, feathered, beautiful and pecking at the bark; it mesmerizes her.
“Grandpa,” she says. “Look at that wonderful creature!”
The grandfather looks up half-heartedly and says, “It’s just a bird.”
And the little girl never really saw a bird again.
This small metaphor speaks volumes to the impressionable mind of the youth and the important role we play to vulnerable ‘students’ experiencing the world. This is the power of teachers.
We have all had them: The intelligent ones, the caring ones, as well as the lazy and the uninvolved. I remember most of my teachers.
I remember a math class in high school where I would pass up my Spanish homework and get a check mark from the teacher, signifying I completed the math assignment. Yes, this is a true story. He would simply check the name was there and a body of work followed, regardless if it were numbers or a foreign language.
What do we learn from class systems like that? For the most part, there are thirty students to one teacher, and there is a curriculum that must be taught. The teachers are tied, in a way, to what they have to teach. So they make graphs, and charts, and little tests that don’t seem to really make us think.
We copy, we paste, we memorize, we recite.
But what are we learning?
Drew Wolitarsky with his English teacher, Casey Cuny.
I had an English teacher in my junior year of high school whom I admired a lot. He was in his mid-thirties, a younger guy, who pushed me to read and write. I didn’t like to do either at the time. I was a football player and to be reading and writing was an entirely different life course.
He told me to stay back after class one day.
When the students left he said, “You don’t have to fit in with everyone. You can explore whatever you want. I have that feeling about you.”
He loaned me a book that would forever change my life: ‘The Five People You Meet In Heaven’ by Mitch Albom. I read it all the way through in a day or two, and came back excited and wanting more. I began reading every day. I’d go to the library, rent books, read them and then replace them with new ones.
Not long after, I remember lying in bed. My heart was pumping. I didn’t know why. I’d never had this restlessness before. Like I had to scream or sing or something, wanting to explode.
My computer was staring at me in the dark and suddenly I knew what was happening. It was calling me.
I sat down and I wrote my first story.
It took me a month and it turned out to be around fifty pages. It felt like I had uncovered a secret power that I never knew I had, like Spiderman waking up to find that his hands could stick to the walls.
A life changer.
I’ve been writing ever since. That man is a teacher.
Drew Wolitarsky with new travel friend, Rolph.
Years later, I was on a train heading from Milan to Zurich. I was sitting in a coach seat, reading, when all of a sudden an Italian voice came over the intercom, saying the train was having technical problems and needed to stop, so we must all board another train.
I was alone and couldn’t really understand what was happening.
I found an English-speaking couple and they helped me, guiding me to the next train, seeing me to the station, and even paying for my bus ticket to my hotel. The man, Rolph, asked if I would join him and his wife the following day for lunch. I obliged.
The next afternoon, I found myself sitting in a restaurant atop Mount Zurich overlooking the green valleys of Switzerland, sipping wine and eating a famous Swiss fondue.
Rolph and his wife told me of their travels and tales of a long exciting marriage. Months spent in the bush, sleeping on their roof, travels to Israel where they witnessed the beauty of the Sea of Galilea.
“Have you ever been?” he asked me. I haven’t.
“Well,” he says. “The Sea of Galilea is magnificent. It has flourished and given men work and food since the times of Christ, and it flows down into the Dead Sea, which hosts no life at all. Do you know why this is?”
“I don’t.”
“Because the Sea of Galilea both receives from the ocean and gives to the Dead Sea, while the Dead Sea only takes and does not give, and therefore hosts no life. It is this balance that makes for a flourishing life.”
Drew Wolitarsky enjoying Swiss fondue with his new friends.
I could never have predicted this meeting, nor the wisdom that was bestowed upon me. But I had been alone and afraid, extremely vulnerable, and in a way, very open to help because I needed it, and it found me.
I realized that to learn anything, there must be a desire to do so. Teachers are all around us, they are filled with wisdom from experience, and yet, if we are closed off they will never reach us and their knowledge will be lost.
There is just as much importance in being an open student than there is in being a responsible teacher. It is a balance much like the Sea of Galilea. To flourish, we must share equally to receive.
I walk through a park, and I hear a child asking his mother, “Why, why, why?” Over and over. We have all heard this. We might laugh. But what an incredible question: Why?
And the mother gives answers like, “Because that’s how it is…Because I said so.” But where is the truth in that? Where is the good?
It is okay not to know. There is no shame in it.
We are all, in a sense, that child, looking for answers. And we often look to the wrong places, ask the wrong people.
When we are open and vulnerable to the wisdom we are seeking, it will find us. There is no shame in learning.
I think there is an incredibly powerful teaching in the very simple phrase:
“I do not know.”
