I was recently talking with a friend about our siblings. She is a social worker, and I learned that her two sisters are a nurse and teacher. “So between the three of you, you uphold civilization,” I said.
I have never been a member of any of these crucial professions, though I have spent much of my professional life in their orbit. The one that would fit me best, though, is teacher. In various projects across the years, I always find myself as the one called to take a block of subject matter, break it into components, then figure out the right mix of student-instructor interaction to help a group understand it.
Of course, in doing so the group usually does much more than acquire new knowledge — that’s the magic part of teaching, and the part I most miss when I don't have it. I long for the way in which students seeing ideas with their own eyes helps me see it in a new way too. It was that longing that made me start this year thinking, “Somehow or other, I am going to make teaching a part of my practice again.”
Later this week, that thought is coming to life with a new weekly class I’m running with a small group. The core idea is simple: each person is bringing a tough-as-nails social problem they want to approach in a new way. Each week, we’ll look at everyone’s problems using one of the six tools in my Social Lens Framework, helping them see patterns and connections they couldn’t apprehend before. By the end of the course, my goal is of everyone to have realized a concrete improvement in how they approach the problem they’re tackling.
My favorite part about this format is that even though I’ve taught various versions of the framework to thousands of people, I never know exactly what is going to happen when we start each class — that’s driven by the students’ curiosity and creativity. Even back when I was a teaching assistance, I loved the moment when the students’ ideas would enter the silence and make it into a conversation. And now I get to do it with people across the country, taking on matters of social justice using an approach of my own design. I’m a lucky dog!