For Love of Students

Yes, No, and Maybe . . .

So already, funny how a professed love of students can take many forms. I’ve been contemplating this recently for three reasons:

• My reading a few days back of a Heather Cox Richardson Substack newsletter* which quotes Donald Trump as claiming Department of Education “employees ‘hate our children.’”**

• My reading last Sunday of a discussion of the Three Weeks of Mourning (sometimes known as the Three Weeks of Affliction) that occur during the Jewish calendar year between 17 Tammuz 17 and 9 Av—we’re in those three weeks right now.

• My participation last Sunday in a Zoom Arthur Sze poetry reading followed by a conversation between Sze and Meg Weston, the founder and host of The Poets Corner.

So let’s begin our exploration of these three potential exemplars of for love of students.

As relates to Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, the cuts to the Department of Education that this week’s Supreme Court decision green-lighted will end, shrink, or destabilize a number programs and services that have historically met the needs of students needing specialized instructional attention. If we’re talking about hate, I hate decisions and policies that withdraw from students the curricular, instructional, emotional, and financial (think free and reduced breakfast and lunch programs) supports essential to their being able to learn and thrive at school. While my comments largely relate largely to K-12 students, other student groups are also being asked to do with less.

Annita Soble Drawing***

Ever since we let children die in vain in Newtown, Parkland, and Uvalde, I’ve believed that America—as defined by our government’s actions—doesn’t care about children, views them as dispensable. Why else have we not passed legislation that would make school shootings nearly impossible if not downright obsolete?

As an educator, I was often in schools that implemented new policies that I viewed as wrongheaded, but that I also recognized as well-intentioned. The latest federal cuts seem to me to be deliberately designed not just to reallocate federal money, but actually to disadvantage particular student groups. I’ve yet to hear any discussion of how these policies benefit students. So no good educational intentions here.

So for love of students? NO!

So now, on to a more metaphorical consideration of what loving students looks like and feels like in practice, presented in the Meaningful Life Center’s weekly op-ed entitled “Three Weeks of Pain, Seven of Comfort, & Two of Return.” If you’re interested in understanding the “3 Weeks of Affliction,” the article is linked here. It recognizes the felt absence of God by many during this time:

Families torn apart by recent violence seem to be experiencing a deep silence. And we all grieve with them. When we think about it (or even when we don’t) we are all living in a long shadow of uncertainty, and the gloom seems to be deepening.

“Where is G-d in all of this?’ many of us are asking. Why is G-d silent?

This felt sense of God’s absence reminds me of what Sister Monica Joan****** experiences and refers to as a “dark night of the soul" in a Call the Midwife episode from several seasons back. What distinguishes this “dark night” season in Judaism is that it is both collective and annual. As imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world created by a generally concealed God who expects us both to sanctify that world and to make it better (which we tend to do insufficiently), we’re bound to have regular experiences of despair and disconnection from Him.

The title of November’s book motivated my choice of this photo.

The op-ed tries to help us imagine God’s absence as presence by elaborating on a analogy first offered by the famous rabbi Hillel: “Reb Hillel explains . . . [some difficult language in the Kaballah] with an analogy of a teacher and student (which is the classical and best example to explain the relationship between the Divine and the mundane).”

Let’s assume the aptness of this analogy for the sake of exploring the op-ed’s elaboration of it. And yes, like all metaphors, this one is bound to have limitations as well as the power to illuminate:

The conventional transmission of knowledge from teacher to student is a seamless process. . . . . However, when the teacher (out of his deep love to the student) wants to convey an entirely new concept – . . . – he needs to collect his thoughts, return into the deepest recesses of his mind until he is ready to being transmitting the new concept.

During the process of reflection, the teacher will suspend his transmission teacher to the student, . . . . The deeper he goes into his own mind, the more he immerses into the new concept, the deeper will be his silence.

From the student’s perspective this silence can be perceived as a disconnection. He can even think that the teacher has abandoned him. In truth what is happening is that the teacher is connecting ever more with the student. His silence actually reflects a deeper bond with the student; this silence is giving birth to an unprecedented new concept that will afterwards be conveyed to the student.

Before I plunge into my list of discomforts and “objections,” I must acknowledge two things.

The first is that Hillel’s students no doubt felt honored to be studying with such a great rabbi, and probably would have waited longingly and patiently for his wisdom. In contrast, the students the computer slotted into my classroom were often far less inclined to hang on my every word.

by Annita Soble

The second is that I understand that the op-ed doesn’t offer the metaphor as a methodology in a best-practices guide for classroom teachers.

So on with my current-day, public-school-teacher reactions to the question of the lovingness of this metaphor.

1. First, in my experience, “the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student is [seldom] a seamless process.”

2. I do agree that most teaching is done for love of students, not summer vacation.

3. Speaking of summer vacation, despite the common belief that teachers “do nothing” during the summer, that’s when many do their most conceptual work.****** How will they approach the new grade level they’ll be teaching? What do they want their “new courses” to teach? What will be the best, most interesting things their students will do to learn? Responsive, listening-centered teaching requires a fair amount of building the plane while flying it, but the building and flying go better when the building has begun in the summer.

4. Relationships and connections are huge in teaching! Maybe it’s because I taught adolescents, but I can think of very few of them—even the most confident among them—who would have perceived my silence in the classroom over a period of days or weeks as something loving I was doing for them. Furthermore, abandonment issues abound among students, and a teacher’s silence can easily be perceived as one more rejection.

In defense of teacher silence, my husband reminded me the other day that teachers and students need breaks from school and breaks from each other. These “doing nothing” times actually do something: they re-energize, make space for new thoughts, and actually create readiness for a new school year.

I think my husband is right. But as a student during the school year, I preferred teachers who spoke as well as listened and thought in front of me. But if education teaches teachers anything, it’s that different students learn and learn best in different ways. What teacher behavior feels like love to some students does not feel like love to others, just as some metaphors resonate more fully with some people than with others.

So for love of students? Maybe . . .

So I now turn to the third and final stimulus for this post, a teaching poet’s response to the educational needs he identified among students eager to expand their literary skills, gifts, knowledge, and reach.

During last Sunday’s Zoom Poet’s Corner event, Arthur Sze spent some time talking about his teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Campus of IAIA (https://iaia.edu/about/visit/)

I was so interested in how he had grown and shaped the creative writing program at IAIA that I went looking for more information about the process—and found an interview entitled “Well-Traveled Path: An Interview with Arthur Sze.” Sze’s interviewer, Esther G. Belin, introduced the interview by saying, “I wanted to know how this little-known, poorly-funded, former Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] boarding school continues to rise and produce some of the best Indigenous writers in the United States.”******* She also shared that Sze had been waiting for a Native person to ask to interview him about the program’s development.

Sze’s journey to both teaching and leadership roles at the IAIA was marked by red tape and advocates who helped him through it. When Sze was first hired, the Institute was part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As a candidate for a teaching position, he had two problems: not being Native American, and not having a graduate degree. But with some red-tape pulling and twisting by others, he was hired. Over the years that the BIA’s support and funding waned and finally vanished altogether, Sze’s teaching load expanded, as did his vision of a creative writing degree program. Soon thereafter, he became the director of the developing program. At times, he worried that his attention to his own writing might deprive his students of the attention they deserved.

A good deal of the interview talks about his approach to teaching his students.

In the early, precarious days, classes were small, . . . , and I was able to focus on each student. The students had raw, amazing life experiences . . . they were able to draw on . . . . They frequently did not have the mechanics of writing down, but I prioritized creative exploration in language. . . . So I experimented with different approaches. I tried to affirm the importance of approaching poetry with a Native perspective or “spin.” I asked students to use, when needed, words from their Native language that were untranslatable into English. I invited students to consider how Native syntax or lack of verb tense could become strengths and not weaknesses to their writing. I emphasized that writing poetry couldn’t be taught, but that I could share with them a series of writing prompts that could help them evolve and grow. I also asked many students to put aside their preconception of what a poem might be and to just write with the recognition that words were powerful, that urgency in language mattered.

One of Sze’s “unexpected approaches” centered on studying a classical Chinese poem in Chinese poem over a period of six weeks:

I not only wrote out each Chinese character but also clusters of words in English under each character. . . . I talked about sound, rhythm, image, and the essentials of poetry. I showed students how the 214 radicals or root elements to the language moved from simplicity toward complexity, how Chinese characters embodied juxtaposition, and how a few Chinese characters even incorporated metaphor through juxtaposition. I shared different translations in English of the same Chinese poem, so that students could see variations and also have the original poem with a skeletal translation at hand. The students were excited and began thinking about how the Chinese language connected or didn’t connect to their own Native languages, . . . .

As a former teacher, I can attest that there are moments when connecting first and directly to students’ own personal, linguistic, and cultural experiences best affirms them as learners and people—and other moments when presenting them with something completely outside of their experience works really well—and has the additional benefit of allowing them to experience themselves as up to the task of encountering and exploring the unfamiliar. Horizons expand; confidence grows.

So did these instructional moves work from the perspective of Sze’s students? They did in the case of Belin, who said, “Looking back, you were using a trauma-informed practice before it even had a name.”

But Belin is the case in point that Sze met not only the socio-emotional needs of his students, but their academic and artistic ones. She has published two books, and two of her poems appear in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo.

During the Poets Corner event, Sze emphasized that poems must be reflect an underlying urgency that makes them worthy of their writers’ and readers’ attention. I believe that Sze experienced a similar sense of urgency when he perceived that IAIA “students were remarkably talented and had enormous potential”: he could do nothing less than create the programmatic and classroom opportunities for them to develop their talent and potential fully.

So for love of students? YES!

And isn’t love of students always about

• imagining the daily experiences of students in schools?

• seeing students as individuals and ensuring they feel seen as individuals?

• understanding something of their circumstances and heritages and taking that understanding into account?

• listening for and recognizing what they each need to thrive?

• providing what they each need to thrive?

• paying more attention to what they want to do with their lives than to what the economists and politicians expect and even want them to do?

• responding to them with kindness and joy while supporting them to reach high standards?

Fortunately, many of us who work and teach in educational institutions, who know young people by name and face-to-face, will continue to do what we do for love of students, no matter how those institutions and the forces upon them conspire to make that difficult.

* Richardson, H.C. (2025, July 16). July 15, 2025. Letters from an American, Substack. https://substack.com/home/post/p-168446679

** Screen shot of image on home page banner of the Hazleton Art League’s website at https://www.hazletonartleague.org/

*** Altered (background made gray) Illustration by Annita Soble, based on the short story Anne Frank wrote on Friday, 11 February 1944 titled 'Little Katrien.’” https://webshop.annefrank.org/de/annita-soble-fuller-kinder.html

**** Meaningful Life Center. (n.d.). Three weeks of pain, seven of comfort, & two of return (weekly op.ed.) Meaningful Life Center. https://www.meaningfullife.com/three-weeks-of-pain-seven-of-comfort-two-of-return/

***** Screen shot accompanying the following: Horsfall, T. (2021, April 27). What Call The Midwife teaches us about doubt and faith. Premier Christianity. https://www.premierchristianity.com/what-call-the-midwife-teaches-us-about-doubt-and-faith/4322.article

****** Photo accompanying Ojeda-Zapata, J. (2014, August 3). My porch becomes a summer workspace. WordPress. http://www.ojezap.com/2014/08/porch-becomes-summer-office/

******* Belin, E. & Sze, A. (2022, July 1). Well-Traveled Path: An Interview with Arthur Sze. Prose from Poetry Magazine, Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/158167/well-traveled-path-an-interview-with-arthur-sze