Can Teachers Learn from Their Students?

Of course they can. That was easy! See you tomorrow!

Yet… I’ve seen several attacks leveled against the common teacherly saying, “I learn more from my students than they learn from me.” I wish I could recall the original source, but I first started seeing pushback on this saying in a widely shared social media post which read something like, “If you learn more from your students than they do from you, then you shouldn’t be a teacher.”

I’ll explain more thoroughly soon, but I have some sympathy for this pushback, as the original claim of “learning more from one’s students” feels emptied of meaning and often offered as signaling some kind of humble virtue.

However, I am a believer in a revised version of the claim. Maybe something like, “Outside of the subject area itself, I learn a great many things from, and about, my students. And yes, even in the area where I am the subject matter expert, they often offer views and ideas I had not considered before.” While the way I have worded this revision is not concise or catchy, it captures my feelings and rings true. How do I know? I experienced this just today, as my younger daughter taught me something about Sylvia Plath and her famous poem “Daddy.”

Otto Plath (Photo held at Smith College)

My younger daughter—a high school sophomore—submitted a multi-media project where she had to, among other things, compare a poem and its themes to those expressed in a song. (She chose Sam Fender’s song “The Spit of You,” which is absolutely incredible and I encourage you all to listen! Wow, the opening riff!) She sent me the finished project this morning, and I listened to it in the car while driving to the Y. What a way to start the day! My daughter talking poetry!

“Daddy” is obviously a well-known, canonical work and usually offered right away when introducing students to Plath and/or the Confessional movement in American poetry. One of the poem’s most cited moments occurs in the sixth stanza:

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.   
And the language obscene

Those well-versed in Plath know I’m referring to the line that simply repeats the German work “ich,” which translates into English as “I.”

Now here’s the beautiful part because it shows how learning often pairs the deliberate with the serendipitous. My daughter doesn’t know any German (she takes Spanish), so she read the work “ich” as something like “ick.” And yes, the daddy in “Daddy” is icky and yucky enough to be compared to some of history’s most notable villains and atrocities. One of my daughter’s tasks was to point out literary devices, and she thus identified “ich” as onomatopoeia. My first response, showing the knee-jerk teacher in me, was, “well, not exactly. She doesn’t know that ‘ich’ means ‘I.’” But then it hit me. She’s right! Not only is she right, but this is something I had literally never thought of! The poem is so steeped in its Germanness and accompanying imagery that it’s an easy point to overlook, and I also don’t spend much time in the higher ed classroom talking onomatopoeia. But my daughter nailed it because Plath is indeed that smart. Of course Plath would use a line that was both onomatopoeia and a deeply ironic pun. Of course Plath would give us a line that reads both “I, I, I, I” and “ick, ick, ick, ick.” It’s brilliant. (Full disclosure: my admiration for Plath’s poetry, especially in terms of sound, knows no bounds.)

This then sent my mind racing, especially to those who are critical of this poem in terms of Plath’s comparisons to the Holocaust, etc. I have always found those critiques misguided because the point of the poem is to present everything as outsized, just as the father figure remains in her adult imagination. To miss this point is to underestimate Plath’s intelligence and command of her subject matter—a definite no no when it comes to Plath because she’s truly masterful.

More importantly, I learned from my daughter’s presentation, and I learned about things both inside and outside my area of subject matter expertise.

First, I learned that if any of you readers out there, at any time, are thinking you are a bad parent or made a parenting mistake, just read “Daddy” and this will reorient you and put you in a better place. I feel pretty safe in assuming my daughter wasn’t sending me a message in selecting this poem! (I will double check with her later.)

Second, the brushstroke of “ich” as an example of onomatopoeia adds a layer to reading “Daddy” that enhances the work’s overall rhetorical objectives. My fifteen-year-old daughter taught me this today in her presentation, and I haven’t even talked about the comparison to “The Spit of You” and all the other brilliant things she had to say. I’m not her teacher for this assignment, but it’s obviously an A!

So yes, a teacher can learn from their students. The silly mistake has always been trying to assign a measurement to this—who cares whether it’s “more” or “less”? The point remains the learning itself, even if just a bit here and there, as that is how learning often comes to us. We’re not dishing out learning here in cups or ounces. Does it matter if we even know whether a teacher believes they learn from their students?

The best teachers learn all the time, from everything and everyone. That statement is true independent of any measurement or quantity. Saying that in the era of great measurement and exactitude may sound a little defensive, but it’s not meant that way. In fact, I just wanted to talk about my daughter’s presentation, so maybe this post isn’t about learning at all.

Now jump in the comments and tell me about your favorite onomatopoeia.