The Essence of What We Do as Educators

The essence of what we do as educators is to seek out, share, and engender hope. This essential element of our humanity cannot exist without empathy, compassion, and love. All our inquiries must begin and end in communion with this very basic ideal.
Yes, we must teach content. Yes, we must contend with standards. Yes, we must figure out how to exist and struggle against a system that seeks to make us and our students objects of those in power, i.e. things (not unlike a saw or a hammer) that perform a function. The intent of this objectification of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves is nothing short of making us human chattel. We do not thrive and we cannot survive as a species in such an environment. We women and men are not slaves.
We cannot shed the bonds of the status quo by relying on spreadsheets, databases, and bubble exams to tell us how well we are teaching. If we allow it, these things will only serve to distract us from our inevitable obsolescence. If we become blinded by these shiny toys, these fancy tools of assessment, we are going to bring the temple down upon our heads. This horrifying potential is not a reality I kindly favor. Something must change.
Since change always brings about conflict, and conflict either precedes or follows change, we educators must seek to bring about the existence of these joined brethren. This indicates we must first discover and uncover that which stands in the way of conflict and change. We must search for their opposites.

What is a force that opposes and/or contradicts change? Inalterable stagnation.

What is the opposing force to conflict?
- It is not peace. Peace is simply an agreement to be in the absence of war.
- It is not agreement. Agreement is unnecessary without some type of conflict to overcome.
- It is not harmony, for humans are not human in the absence of dissonance.

What then is conflict’s opposite? I believe the answer is radical love.

These two things, radical love and conflict, cannot be truly separated from one another. Their opposition implies that together, the two make up a larger whole. This means that if we educators seek to bring about change through conflict- without the co-existence of radical love- we will prove unsuccessful. At the same time, if we have radical love absent of a desire to conflict with and oppose the ideas and structures that stand in the path of all human liberation, here too we will prove unsuccessful.
It is through this co-union or communion between radical love and conflict that we can change our world for the better. It is this idea we must nurture so that we may begin to engender hope in our classrooms. This we can do. This end we must pursue.

By seeking to exist in a constant state of compassion, empathy, and love with (not towards) our students, we may begin to perform the impossible: We may begin to move our world to a safer, healthier, and more spiritually minded place- one in which we may walk and talk not for this force we call God, but alongside and within it. I hope to commune in reverence with you now. Let us begin to seek that type of change. This struggle for hope is the essence of what we do.