My father took me to see the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when I was 12 years old. Just the two of us, for three hours of a great movie. Lawrence is caught between being a self-described savior of the Arab people and being a secret agent for the British Army; two roles that demand hiding truths from both sides. He returns home, brutalized by the war, yet piqued by the allure of helping the Arab cause. He confronts his clever, duplicitous British commander, who cares only about statecraft and carving up the Middle East. In a heated exchange, the commander tells Lawrence, “If we’ve been telling lies, you’ve been telling half-lies. A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”
Driving home from the movies, my father spoke to me about the connection between truth and my identity, and that truth was not something that lived apart from my being. I needed to keep track of my truth, as it could be easily lost. And that it was a defining, if not the most essential, ingredient in my being. He said truth was what connects us as authentic beings. His words echoed my third grade teacher, Ms. Ames, reading us versions of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” when we discussed who was heroic, and how truth gave our identity boundaries, forming relationships with each other and ourselves.
My 45 years as a teacher have taught me that relationships are the heartbeat of teaching. My relationships with students have come to life — in class, on rivers, playing music, on soccer fields, taking trips to Juarez and Baja — when we mutually have offered essential truths about who we are, binding us to each other and to ourselves. The sheer physics of these connections calls both teachers and students to relentlessly put our best selves into the arena, our truest selves, where we learn to lean into the notion of “to dare greatly.” Showing up with vulnerability — daring to think, speak, run rivers, climb rock faces and offer our humanity — we live authentically and with a collective courage that takes us to places we don’t reach alone.
On the first day of my teaching career, I was met in the Casey Jr. High parking lot by a senior teacher as he turned off his motorcycle. Asking if I was new, I told him I was a new social studies teacher.
“Want some advice?” Before I could say yes, he said, “Don’t give the little fuckers an inch, and don’t smile until March.”
That March I took some 20 junior high students on a ski trip to McNamara Hut. We drove up from Boulder and embarked on skis to the hut, arriving some six hours later. The kids were spent, except for Michael Logan. I asked him if he wanted to ski up to Bald Knob, and we skied up to the top, dug out a small area, heated some hot chocolate and watched the sunset. It was a beautiful dusk. Then we skied back to the hut; it was magical.
This is the same Michael Logan who was my son’s mentor, principal at CMS, father of Mischa, who was in my class at Roaring Fork and who helped write my retirement commendation from Colorado Rocky Mountain School. Our time together at the McNamara Hut, at Casey, in class, on trips and soccer sealed the deal. He was mine, and more importantly, I was his for life.
Education is a tricky enterprise. I have spent most of my life as a student or a teacher, and I know it is an imperfect and less-than-revered occupation. Teachers are besieged by too much to do, too little pay, too many students, and face a daunting task coping with the systemic overload of large classes and so much more. Teachers and students feel the weight, the burden of this, and many can succumb to a predisposition of distrust and cynicism.
Today, the corrosive presence of AI seeps into all education, eroding human relationships and leaving a toxic culture of suspicion and distrust towards students. Teachers are sold strategies intended to prevent “cheating,” offering assignments that AI can’t replicate. Marketing teams fabricate spicy pedagogical terms like “data management,” “two-lane assessment” and “cognitive friction,” as they so casually and without conscience trade profit for learning. It is a pedagogical bait-and-switch.
We are living in an era char-
acterized by routine public lying, cheating and, now with AI, a suspicion that nothing is true, nothing is real. It is no accident that we also are experiencing a great loneliness — measured by rates of suicide, depression and chemical strategies to cope. But our lies and half-lies haven’t been called out for their most pernicious quality, which is that they separate us from each other, and from ourselves. Authentic relationships are the only antidote to this loneliness worth its salt and will be a lifeline as we face the uncertainty of our future.
Many years ago, I took a group of students down the San Juan River. Our group hiked up to the precipitous Honaker Overlook, looking 1,000 feet down at the river. Joo Hee, a student and beautiful opera singer, began to sing part of an opera at our request. The notes drifted out over the canyon, and you could see them as they descended, drifting on the gentlest of breezes, still audible, floating forever on the deepest of truths — a beauty that bound us to each other and to ourselves.
The other night, I watched my son Nick coach soccer. At the end of practice, all the kids were waiting, some forty of them. They were all waiting for a fist bump or hug from Nick; that sealed the deal. Those students are his, and he is theirs, and that is a sweet deal.