I’ve committed to trying to read something “real” each school day this year and to write a bit about it.

I found this back essay in Reviews in American History, where historian Michael Kammen talks about mentorship and looks at this topic over time. I don’t want to write about my own awesome, inspiring mentor who took me through the dissertation process but about the ways in which teaching anywhere ought to resemble this process.

Near the beginning of the essay, Kammen quotes another hero of mine describing his own grad school mentor:

He had a gift great teachers have, of simultaneously intimating the imminence of marvelous revelations and projecting his own inability to attain such revelations unaided. . . . Some of us took up his monumental intellectual project. We would help him accomplish the end he put so palpably before us, of unriddling the mysteries of the American character.

I got to thinking about the differences between entering graduate school to become a historian and entering 12th grade. A fledgling grad student usually has some basic skills and a passion for the topic. Most of what follows in grad school builds upon that passion (the dim prospect of a tenure-track position hardly motivates on its own).

What I think drops out of most conversations about high school is the fact most kids have at least one similar passion that’s probably not acknowledged or even central to their school experience. But, if as a teacher or a school, you can find it, you see that your student can rapidly build on whatever basic skills they possess and find ways to quickly develop others. The quote above underscores the possibilities of education when a teacher and a student can simultaneously engage around an exciting problem, be it the meaning of the American character or the replacement for a combustion engine. A high school teacher ought to be engaged in the same kind (if not always the same level) of joint inquiry with their kids as a historian in a seminar room…

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Article opens with this quote:

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” The Education of Henry Adams