Cultivating the imagination in children: you can create an astonishing magic when you say the right thing at the right time in a child's life.

There is a lot of evidence to say that the art of teaching is about remembering--not in the sense of memorization, but in the sense of the deep memory of what it means to be fully human. The Greeks named memory as the mother of the nine different forms of creativity--the nine muses. If teaching is about anything, it is about asking children to remember who they are and the greater context of whatever they are being taught.

I think it would be wonderfully refreshing to children to say "Listen, today we're all going to jump through this hoop together, but you know you're going to come across experiences in your life where what we do and what we say and what we explore today is going to be completely absurd and of no use to you at all--and we're still going to do it." I think children feel then they are being treated as if they know something--which they do. They know that the hoop of the day is not the whole story.

Teaching and learning are about never losing your innocence, because innocence is not a quality you cover over and replace with experience as the years go by, but a valuable faculty of seeing the world new every day. Naturally, you ask, "How do I do this with a mountain of papers to mark--with the state requirements, meetings and all the rest?" The answer is that it is very difficult. It's very difficult in any human life to do it.

The act of remembering who you are and what is essential, and then being able to communicate that essentiality in the midst of all of the dross and difficulty in life, has always been acknowledged as a triumph of individual human existence.

What would it be like to see teaching as the ability to cultivate the imagination in children--to create the biggest context possible for whatever they are being taught? For that cultivation to take place, a teacher has to make him-or-herself vulnerable to what is unknown. Because one of the truths of life is whatever frontier we are on it is just that--a frontier into a landscape and territory that is much larger than anything we can imagine.

I think it's a brilliant thing for a child to sense that adults are actually on the frontier of their own unknown. Not only that, but that they are there in a joyful way. They aren't feeling diminished because they don't have all the answers--they are actually looking to some horizon that is giving them a grand vista. Children can feel this in a palatable way.

Whatever draws you and is precious to you in your life is what you should be gazing upon almost every day. The lack of attention upon that--the lack of gaze, the lack of conversation, the lack of relationship with the star that is calling you--will bereave you of any sense of courage.

This poem is written for anyone who has to take a courageous step in life.

The Truelove

   There is a faith in loving fiercely
   the one who is rightfully yours
   especially if you have
   waited years and especially
   if part of you never believed
   you could deserve this
   loved and beckoning hand
   held out to you this way.
   I am thinking of faith now
   and the testaments of loneliness
   and what we feel we are
   worthy of in this world.

   Years ago in the Hebrides
   I remember an old man
   who walked every morning
   on the grey stones
   to the shore of baying seals

   who would press his hat
   to his chest in the blustering
   salt wind and say his prayer
   to the turbulent Jesus
   hidden in the water

   and I think of the story
   of the storm and everyone
   waking and seeing
   the distant
   yet familiar figure
   far across the water
   calling to them,
   and how we are all
   preparing for that
   abrupt waking,
   and that calling,
   and that moment
   we have to say yes,
   except it will
   not come so grandly
   so Biblically
   but more subtly

   and intimately in the face
   of the one you know
   you have to love
   so that when
   we finally step out of the boat
   toward them, we find
   everything holds
   us, and everything confirms
   our courage, and if you wanted
   to drown you could,
   but you don't

   because finally
   after all this struggle
   and all these years
   you don't want to any more
   you've simply had enough
   of drowning
   and you want to live and you
   want to love and you will
   walk across any territory
   and any darkness
   however fluid and however
   dangerous to take the
   one hand you know
   belongs in yours.

David Whyte, from The House of Belonging, copyright 1997, Many Rivers Press.

We all make vows in our lives, and vows are made on our behalf. You made vows to teaching. It's a marriage--whether you are teaching right in front of children or administrating and supporting a system where that encounter will be allowed to happen in a vital way. Because, otherwise, why would you put up with everything you put up with over the years? The answer is because there is something that is worthwhile at the bottom of it.

It has to do with that astonishing magic that you create when you say the right thing at the right time in a child's life and they remember it for the rest of their life. Your life has joined another life in conversation. Even after you're retired and gone, that conversation is still alive in the world.

This article was excerpted and revised with permission from a transcription of "A Teacher's Vocation: Nurturing the Imagination of Others," a talk by David Whyte.