I Must Find Something I Love In Each of Them

My mother taught in a Friends School for many years. During her teaching career she has taught all ages from Pre-K to adults. She now teaches kindergarten at a project-based learning charter school. At the start of every year we always seem to have the same conversation. She is nervous about the new year. How will it go? What will be dynamics of the class? What type of personalities might there be? And as the first weeks start and she learns about the strengths and weakness of each child before her, she always tells me the same thing. “I must find something that I love in each of them.” In my current teaching of college students, I have taken the same rule to heart. Sometimes it takes time and work to recognize and open yourself up to loving all of these people you find before you. But teaching, she tells me, is about relationship building – relationships between peers and relationships between teacher and student. And this is how children, who become adults, learn about relationships – they learn from the ones they love, and hopefully they love us.

For our next few postings, I have excerpts from an old tract. And the beginning seems useful to consider in this early part of the year. If you’re like me, you’ll want to read it over and over to pull out all the words of wisdom (and question if all the content is still timely). Enjoy!

An Address To Those Who Have The Care of Children (Part 1)
Published Tract Association of Friends of Philadelphia, 1832 (but cannot be quite sure that it is not 1882).

Those who teach others, must first learn to subdue their own passions. –Education is the correcting of fallen nature; and he who hath not, by God’s grace, subdued his own is not yet fit to correct others.

The principal part of education is, to insinuate into tender minds the love of God and virtue; and as we learn best from those we love most, the first step to be taken in education is, to make ourselves loved. Let all instruction then be given cheerfully, kindly, tenderly, mildly, lest by our defects we prejudice those we should instruct against what we teach them; show children in a lively and good-humoured manner that you advise them for their own sakes, and not to satisfy you humour, which never will mend theirs; that you correct them with regret, and encourage them with pleasure. Do not suppose that they are always inattentive through design; some have slow parts, and all are giddy. Children are all clear-sighted enough to discern whether you or they are in fault; would you mend theirs, you must be patient: and perhaps discernment and tenderness are as much wanted in teachers, as docility and attention in scholars. All things are easy to those who know them; nothing so to those who do not. We were once scholars, and perhaps as dull and perverse as those we teach; but suppose you should suddenly gain your point by severity, and lose their hearts; in that case is not everything lost? Will they not, like bent bows, return with greater violence to their former inclinations, when the restraint of a few months or years is over? But when the head is convinced and the heart gained, the work is done forever.