A Journey Made on Horseback
When I was three years old, I wanted to be a horse when I grew up. I didn't know what, exactly, I saw in horses that drew me to them. I did not grow up in the country. No one in my family rode, but one summer we vacationed in Tennessee, and at what was probably a roadside tourist trap, I sat astride an Appaloosa, my hands holding the reins tight. He - or maybe she - paced a steady circle, once, twice, three times around a well-worn track - a living merry-go-round. That horse, the warm smell of leather, my mother's nervous hand twirling the tip of her own braided black hair--this is one of my first vivid memories. Its details carried me through several horseless years.
As I grew, my imagination sustained me. Rather than playing Barbies, house, or school, I played horses in my hushed childhood world. At the age of five, I began to ask: Can I have a horse of my own? And, I heard promises, "Yes, sweetie. We'll buy you one when you're eight, ten, eleven." That day seemed an eternity away to me, so I took to other means to exercise my growing passion. Pencil and paper, clay, and books kept me busy. Over the years, my need to know led me to read encyclopedias of equine care, and a black beauty and red pony introduced me to my second great love, literature. I read, wrote, drew, and molded the majesty of horses, and although I certainly refined my artistic skill and readied my mind for my current life, I met with so much frustration. No matter how much detail ladded or how much I learned, I could not breathe life into clay, perhaps, because my own life had scarcely begun.
Then it happened; at the age of twelve, I was finally born. Proving that horses were no passing phase and contributing an entire $32.17 to the purchase of my first horse, I rode into a world I had read in countless words and drawn into my heart. Ironically, or maybe expectedly, when my dreams became tangibly wrapped in the wiry mane of the horse I named Patience, I read, wrote, and turned to art a bit less, but felt more alive, aware, more authentic. I felt something wonderful happening within me, weaving itself in and out of my past disappointments and hopes, making sense of all those years I spent in preparation for the reality of caring for a a thousand-pound animal. Horses are hard work. And, striking the right balance between horse and rider, I learned, involves more cooperation than control.
Horses have minds of their own, and although they will obey out of fear, they delight me far more when their spirits are not broken, when they are respected as living, breathing beings, when they are not reduced to machinery. To machinery - my heart breaks, now, for the poor Appaloosa of my first memories. I wonder if he knew what it was like to run.
My horses did. During the wind-in-my-hair moments of my teens, I did not imagine I would ever exchange the tangles of chestnut mane and braided leather my heart held so tightly for the certainty my mind holds today, but my husband, my children, and yes, even my students make me understand how my youthful dreams have transformed into a common reality. Being a wife, mother, and teacher often invites complaints of ingratitude and weariness more than it champions accomplishment. Yet, when I recall feedings at 5:00 a.m., mucking out stalls in mid-August heat, and braiding manes with blistered hands for the possibility of success in the arena, I realize horses have been the best teachers I've known. From them, I have learned faith and frustration, freedom and routine, risk and responsibility. Equipped with this knowledge of my past, of myself, I find the courage to teach.
Although the role of self in pedagogy lies largely unexamined, Parker Palmer investigates the importance of identity in his book, The Courage to Teach. He discusses the temptation teachers have to objectify the classroom - everything from students, to content, to themselves. He says that from safe distances, anything we view becomes an object, devoid of life, and "when it is lifeless, it cannot touch us or transform us" (52), and shouldn't education be a transformative process? In his words, I hear a self-defeating prophecy, one that renders students automatons at worst and beasts of burden at best. Course content becomes no more than inert ideas; and self, a concept divorced from professional life.
Wisely, Palmer recognizes some impossible truths of teaching: first, that "teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp;" second, that dealing with the individual personalities and needs of students and colleagues requires an understanding of psychology and a wisdom gleaned from life that few people ever achieve; and finally, that good teaching requires self knowledge (2). These three strands, tangled together in unequal combinations, often leave educators working unproductively, for the first two premises speak of impossibilities—even a lifetime is not enough time to learn so much—but the third premise, the most attainable, often goes overlooked. Teacher education courses usually objectify self out of school, and in doing so, turn out teachers who distort their relationships with their subjects, their students, and most importantly, their own identities, draining education of its life, of its authenticity, reducing it to machinery.
I wonder how many classrooms are carousels whose movement—mistaken for forward progress—lulls teachers into complacency, or worse, inertia, as Alfred North Whitehead would say. Like Palmer, Whitehead, an English mathematician and philosopher, addressed the question of identity in education, though a bit more indirectly and nearly seventy years before Palmer. Whitehead argued against the unexamined life, believing that people must know their pasts to make use of knowledge in the present (3). Sometimes I think myself silly musing on my love of horses and my experience with riding in order to make sense of my current life. I know how disconnected some must see it, but I see the path I've taken and realize that the foundational values of my life come from experience and knowledge, which welled up in a little girl's brown eyes every time she cried for the horse she didn’t have. Perhaps I still rely on that little girl's quiet intuition so much that I cannot adequately explain why I know Palmer and Whitehead are right. Their reasoning suggests that teachers, who must also convince others to make use of knowledge, should know themselves as a prerequisite to any other subject. Whitehead says, in The Aim of Education, "It should be the aim of a university professor to exhibit himself in his own character...as an ignorant man thinking" (37), Yet, I know several teachers who cannot admit to students that they don't know something, who rely more on control than cooperation, and consequently, rob themselves of the opportunity to appreciate their students. They hold the reins too tightly, I suppose.
I wonder if the teachers who refuse to run lack trust in their students or themselves or both. Palmer reminds his readers that high levels of trust often equate to high scores on standardized tests, and low corresponds to low. Does this mean that trust is more important in a classroom than content? Probably not, but teaching involves so much more than content, although knowing it, loving it certainly helps students trust the teacher's knowledge. Trust is a risk that works in both directions. I remember one of my first riding lessons. I was learning to jump, but my lesson horse, Tony, balked momentarily when I trusted him to sail over the wall. Maybe, he had trusted me to get him there from a better angle. I fell off and broke my arm, but I did not know at the time I had cracked a bone. So, embarrassed by my insecure legs and seat and angered by Tony's refusal, a breach of trust, I got back on, and a bit more aware, took him over the obstacle. I learned a little more about what I was willing to risk to pursue my passion that day. And, the truth of it is that I was and am willing to be disappointed, to fall, to suffer injuries, and I do. They cause me to reflect and reacquaint myself with the "me" who continues to grow and trust myself know more next time. I carry this part or my past into my classroom.
I often wonder what other teachers bring. I wonder if they have thought about it, and about whether they feel a sense of belonging there, and if they do, what from their pasts imparts that feeling. Do they see their personal and professional lives as separate threads, stretched parallel to each other or intertwined, like the braided strands of chestnut mane? What about their subjects? How did they determine their content areas, because I bet Black Beauty didn't bring them to English? Do they, like me, reflect upon their past and see the path that prepared them for the classroom?
The questions of selfhood in the teacher's life should begin the educator's journey toward the classroom. Whitehead proposes that a teacher must elicit enthusiasm for his subject through "resonance from his own personality" and simultaneously create "the environment of larger knowledge and firmer purpose" (40), which is no easy task. Yet, if a teacher has come to the classroom through some experience of passion and learning, perhaps that enthusiasm, knowledge, and purpose will come more naturally, more authentically. Whitehead also cautions that "in the hands of dull people" education can suffer "the dryness of the Sahara" (17). I do not know who could be more dull than the teacher who looks into the paths of his own past yet cannot retrace his steps. Perhaps he, too, suffered the tight reins of a desiccated landscape, but Whitehead makes it clear that "pedantry and routine" results in "inert knowledge" (I), which serves no authentic purpose in a student's life and arises, most likely, from a lack of authenticity in a teacher's.
The questions of what to teach and how to teach it dominate pedagogical conversations and public policy, but who will teach - that is key, especially in this age of AI. Can anyone or anything teach without a history of learning—of human experience? I certainly cannot answer that for anyone except me: I am a wife, mother, an occasional writer, and a teacher who celebrates rather than laments her roles. I have braided manes with blistered hands and woven together this life from strands of my past. The journey from there to here has taught me much, and along the way I've borrowed some of the beauty, grace, and strength of horses to become myself in and out of the classroom.
Sometimes we don't remember how we've gotten where we are. I remember though. I was carried by horses.
Works Cited
Palmer, Parker. The Courage to Teach. Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. The Macmillan Company, 1929.
