The Nature of Life and Learning: Questions Now, Answers Later

I’m breaking through

I’m keeping flowers in full bloom

I’m looking for answers from the Great Beyond

Answers.

--R.E.M.

“Why do we gotta read this? Why do we gotta write this? What’s the point of this?”

This is the perennial question posed to teachers everywhere: Why?

Why? students endlessly ask, demanding that their teachers supply them with a sufficient reason to pay their lectures heed. That question so openly posed by students dogs most of us throughout life.

What’s the point of . . . (fill in the blank)?

Sooner or later, we all question the importance of our lives in one aspect or another. Teenagers by their nature seem hard-wired to question life as we know it.

As teachers we are called not only to make our subject matter meaningful but to demonstrate how our various fields of study help to enrich the lives we lead. After all, it is to enhance the quality of life that we teach.

This is especially difficult when we daily face the mystery of pain and suffering in our own lives and in the lives of our students.

High school is a time when many young people first confront the reality of death: A beloved grandmother dies, an uncle succumbs to a sudden heart attack; drinking and driving claim one more friend. Two young men I had the privilege of teaching this year shared the pain of losing their fathers. One received news that his father--”my best friend”--had died in an accident. The other watched his father--”the warrior”--mount a losing battle against cancer.

High school is also when some young people make disturbing discoveries about those they love and trust the most: Dad’s having an affair; Mom is addicted to painkillers; older brother has AIDS. One lovely 16-year-old girl told me that she’s living on her own “because I can’t handle my mom’s new boyfriend. He gives me the creeps.”

A young man of 17 told me he was asked to leave home because “my stepmother thinks I’m a bad influence on her kids.”

And then there was my poetry student who wrote about her brother’s double life:

My brother lives a lie,

Has unprotected sex,

Doesn’t know I know,

About the middle-aged men who are his lovers.

What’s the point? they ask me.

Overwhelmed by their sorrow, I feebly attempt an insufficient answer. I’m well-equipped to diagram a sentence, to catch a split infinitive and to explicate a passage of Shakespeare. Supply an answer to our deepest metaphysical ponderings? Better minds than mine have scaled that slippery slope.

Immanuel Kant claimed that we can only know things as we see them and not as they really are; Soren Kierkegaard sought answers in personal experience illuminated by grace; astrophysicist Steven Hawking continues his heroic quest to “know the mind of God” through the immutable laws of physics.

Generation after generation, we try to answer Job’s perpetual cry: “Why is life given to man whose way is hidden?”

What’s the point? they ask. All I can offer is what the poets have offered me: Life is a preparation for and an intonation of wonders yet to be.

Poet and mystic William Blake said it best:

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

What’s the point?

Be strong and take heart, all you who wait in hope. In the words of St. Paul, “Now, we see through a glass dimly, then we shall see face to face.”