On Teaching

On Teaching

A lesson is a stone dropped in still water; you never see where the last ring lands.

To the educators. To all the educators of the world, the ones who do it for the ripples in time, and not the money. The system here does not pay you the gratitude you are owed; but the memory of your passion, given freely to young minds who could offer nothing back, is a currency that outlasts money by a day. The timeless ones know who they are.

To the healers. To all the healers of the world, the ones who extend the mind by tending the body. The ones who profit are an unfortunate byproduct of the world we were handed; but your care shows in how gently you treat a stranger. I was not always the wealthiest patient, yet a fee was waived when I could not pay. I did not forget you. I write today because of you. Thank you.

I

What is the last lesson you taught?

I don’t mean pen and pad, subject and quiz. I mean the last lesson you taught that resonated through someone’s entire life, the way my cousin Bibiana taught me non-attachment on a beach in Portland, watching a stranger walk off with her camera case and telling me, “He left the pictures.”¹

Hmm.

For me? A lot of the lessons I teach these days are about as internal as they come.

Internal. There’s an old root hiding inside the word educate: educere, to lead out, to draw forth what was already in there.² The oldest teachers knew it. Socrates called himself a midwife and swore he carried no wisdom of his own, only the knack for helping another person deliver the idea already kicking inside them.³ The best lessons I teach now feel like that. Less pouring in. More drawing out.

I’ll get to the rest of that at the bottom of this essay. There’s a “scientific reason” why a random father in Missouri “woke up” and saw the world in a new light.

In a new light. What a strange sentiment. Light really does change the way we see things, doesn’t it? Light and perspective have been an unarguable thread throughout history, but they aren’t the topic of this paper. Maybe a later one, On Refracting. Wait… what would that even be about? Some titles are better left as the thought you had once.

On Teaching.

II

We teach people in everything we do. Every action: holding a door, returning a shopping cart, making a stranger laugh. Each small meeting makes a Jay in each of you (one moment, felt as you live it from your own side, leaning toward or away). You don’t realize it when it happens, but if they’re “listening to the universe in that moment,” you’re about to teach them something about how to be a good person.

There’s a teacher named Parker Palmer who put it about as plainly as it can be put: we teach who we are.⁴ Not what we say we are. Who we are, in the small unwatched moments.

Crazy how that works out, isn’t it?

We’ve known it our whole lives; it’s been repeated any number of times throughout history.

But something else is reported throughout history.

The inability to explain “it.”

The secret of life.

Have I explained it? Maybe to a couple of people, but that’s relative to those people. Never mind the level of intent I have behind it.

The old Chan teachers gave up trying to explain it with words. They called it a transmission outside the scriptures, mind handed straight to mind. They left a warning with it, too: when a finger points at the moon, don’t spend your life studying the finger.⁵ The words were only ever the finger.

III

Have I taught my children anything?

So much more than I was taught at the same age. That’s all we can do as parents: keep teaching our children to be better.

An old historian, Henry Adams, wrote that a teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.⁶ He meant it as a warning. You hand your kids something on an ordinary weekday, and it lands in a great-grandchild you will never meet. What a teacher leaves is a Trace, a wake of intent that keeps moving long after the hand that started it, and other people take it up and live it as Jays of their own. A Trace is left whichever way a teacher faces, cruel or kind, and it is good only to the degree that the teacher is aligned. Negative people have their infamy too, and some of them never realize they’re still teaching: what they leave behind becomes somebody’s lesson.

Do we teach our partners? Every day. My wife teaches me how to be a better husband. She thinks I’m “annoyed by her nagging.” I don’t find it nagging at all. I hang on every word she says, but life gets complicated when you see the world as beautiful as she does.

There’s a line in the Talmud, a teacher admitting he learned much from his teachers, more from his colleagues, but most of all from his students.⁷ Marriage taught me that one. The person you think you are teaching is usually the one teaching you. I suspect it’s one consciousness in both chairs, reading its own face across the table. The Golden Rule starts there.⁸

Earlier today, she joked with me during our walk about how we could “circle back” and have the same conversation with someone. Give them a sense of déjà vu.

That joke turned into uproarious laughter between the two of us, but I realized in that moment the simple joke would resonate with that person for the rest of their life. Eventually they would find it funny.

In a different universe they did find it funny.

In a different universe we did the prank.

This is why I laughed so hard in this universe, because I could see all the positive outcomes such a simple action could have.

IV

Teach joy.

Teach it through action. Honestly, it’s something we lost along the way when we expanded education. Separation of church and state, for sure, unless we’re teaching Unified Field theology as a whole, and what a concept that would be.⁹

bell hooks wrote about exactly this: that a classroom could be a place of joy, that education could be the practice of freedom and not just the practice of compliance.¹⁰ Somewhere in scaling our schools up, we let the joy fall out of the budget.

Put it back. Fund education.¹¹ Children are the future, and they absorb the world we give them, physically and mentally. We shouldn’t be offloading our burdens onto them; we should be putting everything we have into providing for them. They will be here when we’re gone, answering our problems, ones they never asked to answer.

So teach kids how to treat each other with respect. Teach it in schools, teach it at home.

Maybe someday they’ll grow up to be the politicians who want to change this world, because they care about every single individual under the sun, no matter what part of the globe they stand on, or which border they happen to live inside.

Dream a little dream, but never forget it exists under a sun that happened eight minutes and twenty seconds ago.¹²

Live life like the sun just exploded. You’re not going to know about it for several minutes, but do you want to spend them worried about all the things you haven’t done?

V

Here’s the “scientific reason” I promised you, the one for why a random father in Missouri woke up and saw all of this in a new light.

It turns out there is an organ for exactly that. The pineal gland (a pinecone of tissue about the size of a grain of rice, sitting almost dead center in the head) has one essential job: it takes light and turns it into time.¹³ A photon lands in your eye at dawn, and somewhere down the line this small gland is told about it and decides how much of the night-hormone to pour, and that is part of how your body knows what now is. The gland is not the clock. It is the thing that translates light into the body’s sense of the hour.

So “a new light” started as a figure of speech, and it turns out to rhyme with real physiology: light, turned into time, is what the center of your head trades in. Whether that has anything to do with a man waking up is my reading, not the gland’s. I just like that the rhyme is there.

It gets stranger. When researchers went looking inside the gland, they found crystals: real ones, calcite, less than the width of a hair, grown cubic and hexagonal right there in the tissue. Outside the inner ear, the team who found them reported the gland as the only place the healthy human body is known to grow that mineral.¹⁴ Shine the right light through that tissue and some of it comes back at double the frequency; the team believed the crystals were doing it. There may be small, faceted stones answering light in the middle of every one of us. Whether they do anything grander than that, no one can yet say.

And just last year a team did something new: they mapped the genetics of the gland itself, across tens of thousands of people, and reported, in a study not yet peer-reviewed, that common genetic variants alone account for roughly a fifth of the differences in its size, handed down a family line, like the shape of a nose.¹⁵ The instrument that writes now into your body is, in part, a thing your great-grandparents passed forward to you.

Teaching isn’t always about children. It’s about everyone. The way we think teaches us how to act, and the way we act teaches others who we really are. Every moment, you’re teaching the Unified Field who you’ve become, something you can’t see. But what you can see is what you’re teaching others about yourself.

What are you handing them, and are you proud of it?

Notes

1. Johnson, On Forgiving, tells the whole story: a stranger took Bibiana’s camera case and left the memory cards behind, and she let it go, saying that maybe he needed the case more than we did. She was teaching equanimity, and she knew it.

2. English educate comes most directly from Latin educare, “bring up, rear,” which Harper gives as a frequentative of, or otherwise related to, educere, “bring out, lead forth” (ex- + ducere, “to lead”). The Century Dictionary, quoted there, finds “no authority for the common statement” that the primary sense of education is to “draw out or unfold the powers of the mind”; the drawing-out gloss owes more to educere and a Socratic ideal than to the word’s first use. Harper, “Educate.” The leading root really is hiding in there; rearing simply came first.

3. Plato, Theaetetus 148e–151d, where Socrates describes his art as midwifery (maieutikē): he is barren of wisdom himself, and his whole skill lies in delivering what is already in labor in another.

4. Palmer, Courage to Teach: we teach who we are, and good teaching cannot be reduced to technique.

5. “A special transmission outside the scriptures” opens the four-line stanza that also gives “not depending on words and letters.” Tradition credits it to Bodhidharma, but the formula was set back onto him later: its first line is first recorded in the Zutang ji of 952, and the full stanza is first attributed to him in the Zuting shiyuan of 1108, some six hundred years after his lifetime. Welter, “Mahākāśyapa’s Smile,” traces how the silent, mind-to-mind transmission became a founding story of Chan. The finger and the moon belong to the same body of teaching; the Buddha puts it to Ānanda in roll 2 of the Shurangama Sutra, and the image recurs in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra.

6. Adams, Education of Henry Adams, chap. 20, “Failure (1871),” on his years teaching at Harvard: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” The line is usually quoted as encouragement, and in context it is a warning. It comes inside Adams’s misgivings about teaching at all: a parent gives life and gives no more, a murderer takes it and the deed stops there, and the teacher is the one whose reach has no end. That is a heavier sentence than the poster version, and the heavier one is meant here.

7. Babylonian Talmud, Taʿanit 7a, in the name of Rabbi Ḥanina: much have I learned from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and most of all from my students.

8. Both forms of the Golden Rule are meant here: act toward others as you would wish them to act toward you, and keep from them whatever you would refuse for yourself, each weighed from the chair across the table and not from your own.

9. Unified Field, in these pages, is not the physicists’ search for one theory of the forces. It names a hypothetical place where a Self settles into alignment and the Trace of every life is held; a theology of it would teach the traditions side by side, as facing the same way.

10. hooks, Teaching to Transgress. hooks takes “education as the practice of freedom” from Paulo Freire and sets it against schooling that trains obedience; she wants the classroom exciting, never boring. “The practice of compliance” is my paraphrase, not her wording.

11. The economics supports part of this, for high-quality early programs. Heckman et al., “Rate of Return,” estimate social rates of return of about 7 to 10 percent a year for the Perry Preschool Program, a small, intensive program for disadvantaged children in Ypsilanti, Michigan, followed from the 1960s into adulthood. Results for large-scale programs are more mixed.

12. Sunlight’s trip to the Earth is usually rounded to eight minutes twenty seconds. At the mean distance it takes nearer eight minutes nineteen, and over the year it runs from about eight minutes eleven seconds (early January, at perihelion) to about eight minutes twenty-seven (early July, at aphelion).

13. The human pineal is not itself light-sensitive, though its evolutionary ancestor was. Light is detected in the retina by melanopsin-containing ganglion cells and relayed to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the body’s master clock, and only then, by a multisynaptic route through the superior cervical ganglion, does the pineal receive the signal and turn it into the melatonin rhythm that carries circadian time to the rest of the body. Macchi and Bruce, “Human Pineal Physiology.” The gland is the last instrument in the chain, not the ear that hears; “somewhere down the line” is doing real work.

14. Baconnier et al., “Calcite Microcrystals.” The crystals are under twenty micrometers, of cubic, hexagonal, and cylindrical habit, identified by electron diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, and the authors believe them responsible for the second-harmonic generation observed earlier in pineal tissue. That this is, apart from the otoconia of the inner ear, the only known non-pathological occurrence of calcite in the human body is the authors’ statement of the position in 2002, reported here as theirs. Their proposed piezoelectric role remains conjectural, as the paper itself says.

15. Xu et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study,” posted March 11, 2025, the first such study, across the UK Biobank and the Rhineland Study, about 43,500 participants in all. It finds thirty-four significant loci and a SNP-based heritability of about 19 percent: the share of variation in gland volume explained by common genetic variants, which usually understates total heritability. The study is a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed, and its figures may change. It measures the size of the gland, which the authors use as a proxy for melatonin secretion; volume and secretory capacity are related without being the same thing.

Bibliography

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Houghton Mifflin, 1918. First privately printed 1907.

Babylonian Talmud. Taʿanit 7a. Sefaria, William Davidson edition. https://www.sefaria.org/Taanit.7a.

Baconnier, Simon, Sidney B. Lang, Maria Polomska, Bozena Hilczer, Garry Berkovic, and Guilia Meshulam. “Calcite Microcrystals in the Pineal Gland of the Human Brain: First Physical and Chemical Studies.” Bioelectromagnetics 23, no. 7 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1002/bem.10053.

Harper, Douglas. “Educate.” Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/educate.

Heckman, James J., Seong Hyeok Moon, Rodrigo Pinto, Peter A. Savelyev, and Adam Yavitz. “The Rate of Return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program.” Journal of Public Economics 94, nos. 1–2 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2009.11.001.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Forgiving. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20718459.

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Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Plato. Theaetetus. Translated by M. J. Levett, revised by Myles Burnyeat. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.

The Shurangama Sutra. Translated by the Buddhist Text Translation Society. https://cttbusa.org/shurangama2/shurangama2_6.asp.html.

Welter, Albert. “Mahākāśyapa’s Smile: Silent Transmission and the Kung-an (Kōan) Tradition.” In The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Xu, Peng, Mohammed Aslam Imtiaz, Daniel Rusman, et al. “Genome-Wide Association Study of Human Pineal Gland Volume as Proxy for Melatonin Secretion.” Preprint, medRxiv, March 11, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.10.25323654.

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