On Teaching is a lyric-philosophical essay arguing that teaching is continuous with ordinary action — that we instruct one another in nearly every gesture (holding a door, returning a cart, a shared joke), and that the truest lessons are drawn out rather than poured in. Working from the Socratic figure of the teacher-as-midwife (educere / maieutics), Parker Palmer's claim that we teach who we are, the Chan motif of a transmission beyond words and the finger that points at the moon, Henry Adams on the teacher who "affects eternity," a Talmudic note on learning most of all from one's students, and bell hooks on education as the practice of freedom and joy, the essay reframes pedagogy as the propagation of intentional traces through time — the author's recurring figure of jays. Read through the author's quantum lens, a single warm act fans into many possible outcomes across worlds. The piece closes on a charge: teach joy through action, and teach others to see the world as stunning and complicated as it is.
Jamison Johsnon (Thu,) studied this question.