Education and Integrity

It has often struck me that there are very strong expectations of what a teacher can and cannot do. There are times when a teacher really feels this. Checking one's behaviour at work is one thing, but running into a student in the world outside - or online - is often a reminder that public and private are not always separate.

This is not about dishonesty or secrecy - if I am guilty of any sin it is being boring rather than scatological - but still, there is is a place and time for things. This post is not about what is inappropriate, though. It is about aspects of a teacher's life that may be relevant that are often left at home.

After posting a reminiscence of the decade past last week, I became aware of how many wonderful things have happened to me in this time. Yet among the many things I have gained, some things fell by the wayside, and it just might be time to reclaim them. Being a teacher, financially self-sufficient, professionally and academically focused, I have been forgetting some of the principles that made me who I am. They are as relevant as ever, but somehow they have gone underground. And I want them back. Qualities like the extreme resourcefulness that predated the recycling trend, guerilla farming in my kitchen, and judiciously questioning authority when necessary gradually became unnecessary as my income increased, free time decreased, and working under restrictive regimes unobtrusively tweaked my priorities.

I know longer "know everything" like I did ten years back, which is a consequence of hard-won experience. But I think it is time to reclaim, with 20/20 hindsight, some of these qualities. Ideally, integrity in education implies that we can truly be who we are. As learning extends increasingly beyond the classroom walls, it is vital to question identity, both online and off, and discover an authenticity that does "contain multitudes", as Walt Whitman put it, and draws on the best of them. Education can benefit from that. And my classroom can benefit from some guerilla gardening.