Understanding

Indulging my obsession with war movies, I rented Captain Conan, a French film set in WWI and developing, as it went along, a pretty good sense of the moral ambiguities of war.

 Our “hero,” if he may be called that, Captain Conan, is from the petit bourgeois; he is aware of class but finds himself friends with an upper crust aristocrat type who teaches literature at the lycee.  At one point Conan asks his friend, if he is a pain in the butt as a teacher or if he is trying to understand.  The teacher says, understand what?  And Conan says, “The students.”  Yes, the teacher says, that’s what I am trying to do.  I am trying to understand the students.

 Funny to find an aspect of my theory of teaching in a French film about WWI.  But really that’s what it is about: trying to understand the student.  That might seem odd; shouldn’t one be teaching what one knows, literature or whatever.  No.  Education if it takes place at all arises from the attempt of the teacher to understand the students and through that to establish a relationship of understanding between his or her self and the students.

Right now when it comes to understanding my students, I have hit a wall.  I have no intuitive or unspoken sense of who they are anymore, why they are here, what they want, what might be important to them, or what they might see in their futures if anything.  It’s a pretty awful feeling actually.  Perhaps, I have simply gotten too old and can no longer find ranges of reference that might allow me to see my experience in their experience or their experience in my experience.

Or perhaps are values are just too vastly different.