I think in the last 12 years I’ve had about one summer ‘off’, which is to say, a summer where I wasn’t doing a Masters, PhD, HOS training, or HOS mentoring. When I had that summer break it was, despite my best efforts, not a great break, or as my wife likes to remind me, I was bored. So when those moments come when I think that I’d just love to have time to read and read and learn (and maybe a little hiking and surfing in the mix), I remember that summer and come a bit back down to earth. The question that bothers me, especially given that reading and learning are things that I love, is why? Below is one answer I’ve come to.
A recent book post of mine was about Richard Feynman’s autobiography. In it he tells us about the time he spent at the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton. This Center, which at the time housed people like Einstein, was set up as a place where smart people could just think great thoughts, read, and be smart. It was a place for devoting one’s whole intellectual energy to whatever project or ideas one found interesting. It’s a place where academics don’t have to be distracted by students and classes. But Feynman found all of this not to his taste.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains….with no classes to each, with no obligations whatsoever…. They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas…. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge…. The questions of students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things. So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept a position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Ever.
I was fascinated by this reflection. First, it gave some clarity to the challenge I described above. It also clarified a gemara that I’ve struggled with forever. In Makkot 10a Rebbe Yehudah HaNasi says, “I learned much Torah from my teachers, and from my colleagues I learned even more than from my teachers, but from my disciples I learned more than from them all.” In what sense? I mean, one can’t say that the quanta of information was greater from the students, or their insights consistently deeper – so what does Rebbe mean? I think it may be Feynman’s insight. It’s not that the student stumps the teacher, or even challenges him (though both may happen). It’s the simplicity of learning new knowledge that generates questions for an expert, if that person is open to those questions. This is the unseen rut that an expert falls into – not noticing the questions because he or she already knows so much! The student may not, likely does not, understand what they have sparked in the teacher. But a teacher who is truly open has students that they can’t live without.
I shared this midrash with our staff today as an introduction to our professional learning day, both to think about our relationship with students, as well as colleagues, and a couple of teachers had what I think is an even deeper insight. Of course students are not teaching us the most in the sense of content, and may provide some boost in terms of their questions, a la Feynman. But every teacher knows that our students challenge who we are as individuals, and help us learn who we are. They challenge our empathy, patience, resilience, and even our identity. They shape us, perhaps even more than we shape them.