All of my old teachers are dead. This is something that pops into my head once in a while although it isn’t completely, literally true.

Many of my teachers are old or were old when they taught me and are still alive, and there are some I’m sure who have passed. But do old teachers die?

They do and they do not. In order for you to “have been taught,” the teacher must be dead. They have either been killed by the student, or by the teaching, or by some relationship between the three to where the student steps over the body in order to move along.

The teachers who most influence you are stuck in your head as feelings or voices that erupt at moments when you need some kind of inspiration or injunction. I think this is because the moment you face is conceived of in your conscious mind as a problem to solve, yet your unconscious mind – your spirit – recognizes that moment as a moment of instruction; that moment that you thought was a problem is actually your teacher.

I travel in circles where students are often talked about and thought about as a frustrating cluster of problems. I don’t know why you would become a teacher or a professor if you did not want to encounter surprising statements or beliefs from students. They are not there for you. They are not there to reinforce your views on your subject or your approach to the topic of the course. They are there to learn, and presumably they are to learn from you.

This relationship, among these kind of people (who can mostly be found on Reddit in r/professors, a kaleidoscope of horrendous and pathetic discourse) is one of direct relationship. I tell the students what to do, they re-present it back to me, I grade it, they complain about my grading, and the whole time I’m surveilling them because they are all cheaters, stupid, or both. The focus on behavior and discipline – coded in the term respect – is not the role of the teacher or the professor. It comes directly from this narrative, that the professor/teacher is providing something to “lower” people who either don’t deserve it or can’t understand it – and therefore should be grateful to the instructor for the opportunity. I hear this all the time in the discourse of my in-person colleagues but after finding this sub-Reddit I am certain it’s everywhere.

Alternatively, the teacher can be influenced by the not-dead-but-dead teachers in their head crying out to reframe the classroom not as an economic problem or a relationship problem but as an opportunity to learn. They could accept what they feel their students cannot, that this moment is a special privilege and if one is open to the moment and responsive, one can really learn something valuable.

Instead of the classroom as a transactional space, or an exchange of capitalist value (your labor for my intellectual “wealth”) our imagination of that space could be anything that helps us create and craft rather than a stripped-down ritual of obedience and fiat value. Good liberal professors use “contract grading” as a way to be fair, but this is simply palliative care. The point is not to have a peaceful death, or to mitigate the pain of death, but to cut through – to kill the moment, slice through it, and come out of it without needing the teacher.

One of my older metaphors might be a good starting place for those of you who really want to cut through the nonsense and die for your students – the National Park Ranger in the United States. These people are the stewards of the national parks, a source of orientation and information about the park space, and they help visitors find their way around. But when the building, the mountain, the park itself is available they step to the side. They do not interject themselves, demand respect for pointing toward it, or insist that you discuss the moment/event/experience in a particular way. They are there to assist, guide, and help the visitor have a profound, powerful, moving, and learning experience. Just recently I had the chance to hear a Park Ranger discuss The Stonewall Inn and it provided layers of appreciation to what I already knew about the moment and the place. Current popular modes of university teaching would be stretched to assume the students bring in any knowledge with them to the class, most of them seek to avoid knowledge. It’s a very stark contrast in attitude.

Old teachers are dead, and we have moved on from them – however they are not dead, not literally (sometimes they do this) but they are dead to us as teachers and have transformed into someone or something else. But they leave us with a sense we carry forward in our lives, a sense that we could always be in a classroom, we can always be and most often are a student. Getting ready for the semester is preparing your own death as a professor, preparing a situation where the students can gather up the strength and desire to kill you and thereby keep you and them alive in the way that is demanded of pedagogy.