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. What is the last lesson you taught that resonated through someone's entire life — the way Bibiana taught me about the importance of non-attachment to material things, as I wrote of in On Forgiving?

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.[1] 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.[2] 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 the paper — 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. 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.[3] 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.[4] The lesson was never the words. It was the thing the words were pointing at.

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. This is a theme repeated throughout history and theology.

An old historian, Henry Adams, wrote that a teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.[5] That's the terrifying, beautiful part of it. You hand your kids something on an ordinary Tuesday, and it lands in a great-grandchild you will never meet.

Do we teach our partners? Every day. Like I said, 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.[6] Marriage taught me that one. The person you think you are teaching is usually the one teaching you.

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.

A teacher named 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.[7] Somewhere in scaling our schools up, we let the joy fall out of the budget.

But 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.[8]

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.[9] 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 how your body knows what now is. You don't carry a clock in there. You carry a thing that translates light into the feeling of a moment.

Sit with that. "A new light" was never a metaphor I reached for. It's the literal currency the center of your head trades in.

And it gets stranger, in the good way. 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 it as the only place the human body is known to grow that mineral at all.[10] Shine the right light through them and they bend it, double its frequency, hand it back changed. There is a small, faceted, light-answering stone in the middle of every one of us. Whether it does anything grander than keep time, no one can yet say — but the catching of light is not in dispute.

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 its size as roughly a fifth inherited — handed down a family line like the shape of a nose.[11] The instrument that writes now into your body is, in part, a thing your great-grandparents passed forward to you.

Which is the whole paper, told in tissue.

Notes

1. Accuracy note: the derivation is genuinely contested. English educate descends most directly from Latin educare, "to rear, to bring up," which is related to but not identical with educere, "to lead out" (ex- + ducere). Lexicographers have long cautioned that the popular "drawing out" gloss reflects educere and a Socratic ideal rather than a securely primary sense. The root really is hiding in there; it is simply not the only one.

2. 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 labouring in another.

3. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998): that we teach who we are, and that good teaching cannot be reduced to technique.

4. "A special transmission outside the scriptures" — the four-line stanza that also gives "not depending on words and letters." Accuracy note: it is traditionally attributed to Bodhidharma, but the formula is a later retrojection: scholars trace the slogan to the Zutang ji of 952 and its fixed form to the twelfth century, some six hundred years after Bodhidharma's lifetime. The finger-and-moon warning belongs to the same body of teaching, and is put memorably in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra.

5. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (privately printed 1907; published 1918), on his Harvard teaching: "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Accuracy note: the line is usually quoted as encouragement, and in context it is a warning. It arrives inside Adams's misgivings about teaching at all — a parent gives life, 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 inspirational poster version, and the essay means the heavier one.

6. 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.

7. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

8. Sunlight takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach the Earth.

9. Accuracy note: the human pineal is not itself light-sensitive, though its evolutionary ancestor was. Light is detected in the retina by melanopsin-containing ganglion cells, relayed to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and only then — by a multisynaptic route through the superior cervical ganglion — does the pineal receive the signal and convert it into the melatonin rhythm that sets circadian time. The gland is the last instrument in the chain rather than the ear that hears; the essay's "somewhere down the line" is doing real work.

10. S. Baconnier, S. B. Lang, M. Polomska, B. Hilczer, G. Berkovic, and G. Meshulam, "Calcite Microcrystals in the Pineal Gland of the Human Brain: First Physical and Chemical Studies," Bioelectromagnetics 23, no. 7 (2002): 488–495. The crystals are under twenty micrometres, of cubic, hexagonal, and cylindrical habit, identified by electron diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, and are held responsible for the second-harmonic generation previously observed in pineal tissue. Accuracy note: the claim 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' own statement of the position in 2002, and is reported here as theirs rather than asserted as standing anatomical fact. Their proposed piezoelectric role remains conjectural, as the paper itself says.

11. "Genome-wide association study of human pineal gland volume as proxy for melatonin secretion" (medRxiv, 10 March 2025), reporting the first such study across the UK Biobank and the Rhineland Study — some 43,500 participants in all — with pineal volume estimated at roughly nineteen percent heritable across thirty-four significant loci. Accuracy note: this is a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed; its figures may change on review. Note also that the study measures the size of the gland, which its authors use as a proxy for melatonin secretion — a real but imperfect stand-in, since volume and secretory capacity are related without being the same thing.

References

Adams, H. (1918). The education of Henry Adams. Houghton Mifflin. (Privately printed 1907)

Baconnier, S., Lang, S. B., Polomska, M., Hilczer, B., Berkovic, G., & Meshulam, G. (2002). Calcite microcrystals in the pineal gland of the human brain: First physical and chemical studies. Bioelectromagnetics, 23(7), 488–495.

Babylonian Talmud, Taʿanit 7a.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Macchi, M. M., & Bruce, J. N. (2004). Human pineal physiology and functional significance of melatonin. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 25(3–4), 177–195.

Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. Jossey-Bass.

Plato. (1997). Theaetetus (M. J. Levett, Trans., rev. M. Burnyeat). In J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Plato: Complete works (pp. 157–234). Hackett.

Welter, A. (2000). Ma-tsu Tao-i and the beginnings of the Chan "special transmission outside the scriptures." In S. Heine & D. S. Wright (Eds.), The Kōan: Texts and contexts in Zen Buddhism. Oxford University Press.

Xu, Y., Imtiaz, M. A., Rusman, T., et al. (2025). Genome-wide association study of human pineal gland volume as proxy for melatonin secretion [Preprint]. medRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.10.25323654

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