Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside.

Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness.

For me, teaching is about weaving a web of connectedness between myself, my students, the subject I'm teaching, and the larger world.

Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge-and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.