Some years ago, I was administering the FCAT Writes test to
about thirty-five students, all crammed into my classroom, a stifling, hot
classroom, thanks to the fact that it was a cool winter day, and the district’s
policy was to shut off the air conditioning when the outside temperature dropped
to a certain point. That was fine for
classrooms who had windows and could open said windows if it got stuffy, but I
was in an interior classroom. No
windows, and, as I said, about thirty-five little heaters steaming up the room.
It was so warm, well above eighty, that the walls were
actually sweating. Water dripped down my
white board.
For thirty minutes or so, students worked busily on crafting
their essays. I wasn’t allowed to
collect tests until the forty-five minute time limit for the test was up, so
after each student finished their test, they closed their booklet and then,
because it was so warm, put their head down on their desk and went to sleep.
Fine. Let them sleep,
I thought, as long as they were quiet and no one was snoring—let them sleep.
Finally, a short time later, I called time on the test and
went around the room, picking up papers.
But when I picked up Cheryl’s paper, I was in for quite the
surprise.
Water had pooled on her paper and was dripping onto the
desk.
Had Cheryl smuggled in a bottle of water?
I looked at Cheryl.
She blinked sleepily back at me.
And then I realized what had happened.
Cheryl had drooled on her test.
And not only that.
She had drooled on the bar code that identified the booklet as hers and
the ink was bleeding.
All I can say is that made for a very interesting call to
the district that morning and I was thankful it wasn’t me who had to make that
call.
But every year after that, I gave an extra instruction to my
FCAT test takers. If you sleep, move the
paper out from under your head.
Don’t drool on your test.
It’s actually amazing the number of crazy directions I had
to give students over the fourteen years that I taught eighth grade.
Do not stick your pencil in the fan blade.
Do not drop your pencil into the air conditioner.
Stop sniffing your paper.
You cannot pierce your eyebrow in class.
Do not change your clothes in the middle of class.
Get off the floor.
Do not tape Jimmy or any other student in this room to their
chair.
Once, in another classroom, two boys stuck a fork into an
electrical socket, blowing the power to that room. When the teacher called the parents
explaining why he had to write them up, one parent asked, “Did you ever tell
them NOT to stick the fork in the socket?”
I have been out of the classroom now for six years and
frequently people ask me if I miss teaching.
I don’t miss teaching.
I do miss being a teacher.
There’s a difference.
I miss being a teacher.
I miss having that purpose. I
miss (especially as a Language Arts teacher) the sheer joy of opening doors to
strange and wonderful and amazing worlds and introducing those worlds to my
students for the first time.
But teaching these days is especially tough … for many reasons.
But in some ways, teaching has always been tough, because
we, as human beings, have always been difficult students.
One of the hardest things about teaching eighth graders is
that they take things so literally. They
have a hard time understanding figurative language and symbolism. They have a hard time appreciating
abstraction.
In many ways they are very similar to the disciples in
today’s Gospel reading.
Jesus is referred to as “teacher” roughly forty-five times
in the gospels (in the New Revised Standard Version). And that does not include the times he is
simply called “rabbi” which, of course, also means teacher.
Jesus is a man of titles.
Son of God.
Son of Man.
Messiah.
But it is “teacher” that I want to look at today.
In today’s Gospel reading, we find Jesus on a boat with the
disciples. The disciples realize that
they have forgotten to bring any bread with them and only have one loaf between
them. Jesus looks at them and
immediately sees this as a “teachable moment.”
He tells them in Mark 8:15, “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and
the yeast of Herod.”
Now you and I know that he doesn’t mean this literally. And while we maybe don’t quite understand
what he’s saying, we know enough about the Pharisees and Herod to know that we
probably don’t want anything from them.
If Jesus had said this to us, we would have raised a thumb
and given him a “Gotcha, no yeast, Pharisees and Herod bad,” to which Jesus,
being a good teacher, would probably have asked some follow-up questions to
make sure that we truly understood what he said.
But the disciples don’t even make it past the literal versus
figurative language part of the lesson.
Jesus says “yeast” and the disciples look at each other and
say, “This is because we forgot the bread, isn’t it?”
And then Jesus has, what many teachers will recognize as … a
mini meltdown. “This isn’t about the
bread,” he says, and then adds, “Do you still not perceive or understand? Are
your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and
fail to hear?”
In other words, “How are you still not getting this?” And then he reminds them how he fed the five
thousand and later the four thousand.
What the Pharisees and Herod offer can never fill them. They can only be truly fed and filled through
Jesus.
Something tells me that even after all that, the disciples
were probably still thinking about bread, but the problem that Jesus faced as a
teacher was this: the people he was trying to teach did not have the capability
of understanding all that he had to offer.
They had no context. They
couldn’t begin to imagine what this living water truly was. They couldn’t begin to fathom what Jesus
meant when he referred to himself as the bread of life. True understanding or even the first
footsteps on the path of understanding could not begin to happen until Jesus
died and was resurrected.
But even today, though we may have more context, more
experience to work with than the disciples did, we too still have a hard time
understanding the great mystery, the divine nature of Jesus, and how and why
exactly our souls are filled when we are in relationship with him.
When I was a teacher, I pushed my students to do better, to
rewrite, to revise, to reread. Learning
is a struggle and as long as we persist in that struggle we will grow. But I had to be careful not to push so hard
that my students gave up and abandoned all hope of ever understanding.
We may only understand one, one-thousandth of who Jesus was
and what his message meant, but we persist, we purposefully struggle, we ache
to know more, to know better. And so, we
become lifelong learners, lifetime students of Jesus.
Amen.
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