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My mom used to always tell me I was helpful. I wanted something different — brilliant or unique or possibly pretty. Helpful seemed like something that would wear a bonnet or sweep ashes off the hearth or murmur suggestions while remaining abashed. That was not me. When I worked in a large suburban school the secretary once suggested I wait until the men spoke before I said anything. I did not do that. I also made it a practice to protect and defend my students from anything that smacked of unfairness. However, I was also helpful. I gave other teachers my lesson plans and resources and trained student teachers and tried to bring other creative writers to visit my English classes and help my students feel better about reading and writing. I wrote college recommendation letters and if a student needed me for more than an academic reason, I was there. My boundaries were healthy. I did not invite students to my house or let them call me at home, but my door was open, and I stayed to hear whatever they needed to tell me. I handed back their papers swiftly with notes and encouraging comments.

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I was beaten into literacy by an angry Irish teacher at a school located outside of Dublin. I was six and had managed very well in American kindergarten where we carried our chairs for credit. In fact, I had starred as Mother Nature in the spring play and had learned all my lines by heart because I could not read. People were less ambitious in those days. You learned to read in first grade unless your parents wanted to bother teaching you earlier. Mine didn’t. While they had both graduated from Harvard and attended Harvard graduate school, teaching kids to read was what school was for. Mind you, reading was all anyone did in my house. My father, an English professor and writer, did nothing but read and my mother, a practicing architect, had books piled next to her bed. My sisters read. What else could they do? We were not allowed to watch television except for two hours on Saturday night. I spent all my time outside running amuck. My nickname was “the wild child”; reading didn’t matter yet.

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Here’s the problem, teaching requires the creation of community and that is nearly impossible to do with technology. Yes, there are Facebook groups and support groups and recovery groups who have formed bonds but here’s the thing, students need community, they need guidance AND they need to learn something new, challenging and often without an immediate reward. These three elements are how most teachers construct their teaching framework with an unconscious instinct to protect, mentor and model ethical behavior. There have been many descriptions of how the brain works to accept knowledge, find connections with previous ideas or understandings, and then add this new information to, hopefully, be applied to both the present and the future and even to the past. The classroom, the college campus are families, villages, cooperatives and communes. The role of the leader is to inspire, teach and then step aside to allow the students to find their own ideas, information and life lessons like, es, it’s hard to share a small room with someone you don’t particularly like.

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