Teaching as a Struggle to Learn

   Today, my writing student was telling me a little bit about her own experience in teaching another student as part of a volunteer program in a community centre. She was explaining how she often had to learn the very difficulty that her student is going through in order to be able to help her with it. In a way, she was describing how the act of teaching becomes a way of recognizing what the teacher doesn't know, or at least would like to know more about. I thought about this and I realize, it's only by going through the same difficulties as students that teachers can really reach into their lives, as well as learn about their situations. Could it be that people connect to each other in the deepest way through shared difficulties?
     It sounds a bit humanistic and perhaps even cliché, but I suggest that much of this challenges the traditional view that a teacher needs to be a kind of 'expert' in a certain subject or field. Of course it's important for the teacher to at least have a passing interest in the subject areas they teach, so that they are motivated to keep learning within that field. But the pressure to become an expert can be mitigated, especially in a time period when teachers are more expected to prepare students for gruelling exams and standardized tests. It can also give the student greater confidence and empowerment to know that their teacher is on a similar learning path with them. There are no points in life when anyone is a total expert in some subject area, and even Einstein was known to suggest that his own struggles with mathematics are bigger than those around him.
    Writing is a very good example of what I am talking about. Although I encourage my students to brainstorm and go through the standardized 'stages' of process writing (brainstorming, clustering ideas, drafting, revising, etc.), I myself have difficulties even getting past the brainstorming part. There are times when I even skip this process, because the feeling to write may just come over me very quickly, and I find that brainstorming only loses the momentum to write that is already existing in me at that time. There simply isn't a unified standard out there for how to write, or in how many stages. But the very fact that I wrestle with these decisions can qualify me (perhaps) to share my journey with others. I think this is the valuable aspect of daily writing which doesn't come out until the writing becomes a daily habit. At that time, you start to get into an instinctual feel for what to write about, based on your previous practice in writing.
    Schools often pressure people to become experts in writing and logical thinking. But the ironic part about this is that the more students are pressured to become anything, the more the withdraw from regular exposure to the activity due to fear of failure. It makes no sense from this view to expect students to become experts. On the contrary, it's only by treating writing or other skills as a form of play that they can become enjoyable and even mysterious. When I am writing this blog, I often haven't the slightest clue what it's going to be about until my fingers start to do the typing. Sometimes I end up surprising myself in the process of doing so, but isn't that the real goal of learning: to surprise ourselves and discover something new within?