TITLE: Trusting Students with Hidden Masterpieces
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 23, 2005  1:50 PM
DESC: A scene from The English Patient reminds us to trust our apprentices to understand beauty when they see it.
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BODY:
When I first started thinking about applying for the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-05.html#e2005-05-18T14_36_09.htm">
   position of department head</A>,
a former student asked me how I give up time from my
classroom teaching, which is where, from his point
of view, the best part of an academic's life happens:
the A-ha! moment, when a student suddenly gets it.
This particular student likes to teach just for those
moments.

I like the A-ha! moments, too, and will miss having
more opportunities to experience them.  (For the next
few semesters, I will be teaching one course each term
rather than three.)  Sometimes, though, other things
are more important, and I think this is one of those
times.

A-ha! moments are wonderful, but there is another
kind of moment that I find as gratifying if not more.
The movie
<A HREF="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116209/">
   The English Patient</A>
captures one of these moments perfectly; writer
Ron Rolheiser describes just how in
<A HREF="http://www.ronrolheiser.com/arc091204.html">
   one of his essays</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
In the movie, The English Patient, there's a wonderful
scene, stunning in its lesson:  

A number of people from various countries are thrown
together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war
Italy.  Among them are a young nurse, attending to an
English pilot who's been badly burned in an air-crash,
and a young Asian man whose job it is to find and defuse
land-mines.  The young man and the nurse become friends
and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise
for her.

He takes her to an abandoned church within which he has
set up a  series of ropes and pulleys that will lift her
to the ceiling where, hidden in darkness, there are some
beautiful mosaics and other wonderful works of art that
cannot be seen from the floor.  He gives her a torch as
a light and pulls her up through a series of ropes so
that she swings, almost like an angel with wings, high
above the floor and is able to shine her torch on a
number of beautiful masterpieces hidden in the dark.   

The experience is that of sheer exhilaration; she has
the sensation of flying and of seeing wonderful beauty
all at the same time.  When she's finally lowered back
to the floor she's flushed with excitement and gratitude
and covers the young man's face with kisses, saying over
and over again: "Thank you, thank you, thank for showing
this to me!"

And, from her expression, you know she's saying thank
you for two  things: "Thank you for showing me something
that I could never have come to on my own; and, thank you
for trusting me enough to think that I would understand
this, that I would get it!"
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm not in teaching for the kisses (if I were, then I
would be judged a horrible failure), but <EM>this</EM> is
the sort of moment that touches me deeply in teaching.
Something like this doesn't happen all that often, but
it happens as often as the revered A-ha! moment.  And
I think it is a better reflection of how a student-teacher
relationship should be viewed.  The best part of teaching
lies not in giving the student new knowledge, or even
helping the student to understand something complex or
difficult -- though that's important.  The best part is
in helping students go places and see things that they
wouldn't have gone and seen otherwise.

I think that this is possible more often than we sometimes
let ourselves believe.  The key lies in the second part
of the nurse's thank-you in the movie:  We have to trust
our students and apprentices to "get it", to appreciate
beauty and elegance.  We do more damage to learners by
not trusting them than by explaining poorly of expecting
too much.
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