Sustaining the Weary with a Word

In church the other Sunday, one of the key verses we heard read was from the book of Isaiah, chapter 50, verse 4: "The Lord God has given Me / The tongue of the learned, / That I should know how to speak / A word in season to him who is weary." Almost from the very beginning of my life, I have longed to become a teacher. Since I was raised in poverty, it seemed a goal that was quite distant from the reality of my daily life. I always instinctively believed, however, that education would be a key to the escape for which I longed.

I married at age twenty after working as a secretary for a couple of years in Wichita. During the time I was working in an office full-time each day, I also attended night classes at Wichita State University to pursue my goal slowly of teaching English at the high school level. Since my husband also wanted to pursue a professional career, we decided to get loans (it was the early 60's and money was freely available through government loans from the National Defense Education Act). I began my first teaching position as an adjunct at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and then went on to add another thirty-four years to my teaching career before I retired in 2006. I sometimes wonder about the worth of my work though. Teaching is not easily measurable. Today, especially, it is a great challenge.

Much research has been devoted to analyzing the nature of today's student who has been reared watching television, playing video games, seeing movies, searching computers for information and for social networking, watching DVD's, and so on. We teachers have taken many short term workshops to learn how to become "guides on the side" rather than "sages on the stage." We have learned that today's students simply cannot endure too much content and must learn more through cooperative groups and case studies. For myself, I have also believed that students struggle with a variety of personal struggles that need our attention as teachers. As the verse in Isaiah says, I believe we are to sustain the weary with a word. We are there to be counselors as well as teachers. I hope I have done both in my long career in the classroom.

One of my favorite plays through the years was Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. The famous dialogue between Sir Thomas More and Richard Rich has always been rich for me as well:
"Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one."
"If I was, who would know it?
"You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that."
Since teaching is a career whose worth and value are not easily measured, we can only hope that, in the eyes of God, we have done an acceptable job.