Narratives and Covenants

At the end of each trimester, our teachers take the opportunity to reflect on the progress their students have made.

At the end of each trimester, our teachers assign grades to their students (actually we don't assign letter grades until students reach the third grade; I have difficulty with the moral responsibility of labeling a six- year-old as a "D" student or an "A" student when, as anyone who has any first-hand experience with the vagaries of the six-year-old mind well knows, how they act and what they know can change markedly from day to day).

More importantly, at the end of each trimester, each of our teachers writes a narrative commenting on how each student in her or his class has handled the challenges of the past three months. These narratives tend to run from one to three paragraphs, and each teacher writes about each student, so a 5th grade student would receive comments from her homeroom teacher as well as from her Spanish, Art, Music, Science, Physical Education, and Computer teachers.

These reflections run the gamut from commenting on why the student deserves the grade he earned to what he needs to improve upon next trimester. But often these narratives also speak to the fundamental nature of the relationship between student and teacher.

Last week marked the end of our first trimester, and I took the opportunity to review all comments before they were sent home. Though such an undertaking can be grueling in terms of a time commitment, every time I do it, I am struck once again by not only how well teachers know their students but also how much they care about them.

Here's a typical comment by a teacher about a 5th grader, "an intelligent young man. Some of my favorite interactions with him stem from casual conversations at lunch or in the hall when he initiates a discussion about current events, a vacation, or some invention that might be on his mind."

It's clear that this teacher has an intimate relationship with this student, one that transcends the intellectual environment of the classroom to embrace those moments that all of us treasure - the communion between two kindred spirits.

In my mind, this articulation of the student-teacher relationship embodies the essence of education - an appreciation of insight, creativity, and individuality; a nurturing of enterprise and expression; and a shared trust in the idealism of imagination.

This is the covenant between student and teacher: the teacher nurtures and the student trusts, the teacher listens and the student elucidates, the teacher prompts and the student soars.

But this covenant is not exclusively unilateral, for with such a covenant - as with all covenants - comes the responsibility that each party recognizes and acknowledges the individual integrity of the other. Thus student-teacher covenants are based as much upon mutual respect for the intellectual virtue of collaborating individuals as they are upon a respect for the shared emotional bond implicit in any intimate relationship.

Student-teacher covenants demand that equal attention be paid to both the intellectual and the emotional, for the two are inextricably bound together. This is why it is virtually impossible for students to learn or for teachers to teach in schools where a sense of emotional engagement is not valued and honored.

If schools are to be effective incubators of knowledge, of civics, and of character, they need to ensure that the covenants between students and teachers are predicated not only upon the quest for critical understanding but also upon the appreciation of those emotional cords that bond students and teachers together.

Those of us in education - students, teachers, parents, coaches, and administrators - are blessed when such covenants are nurtured.

--Steve McKibben
12/10/06