On Teaching
The Importance of Education, The Impact of Educators, and Outcomes That Stem From Their Resilience
An essay on the importance of education, the impact of educators, and our debt to them. Teaching, here, is treated as one of the purest forms of leaving a legible trace: the teacher's coherence passes into students and travels forward through lives the teacher will never see. The piece is warm and grateful in register, attending to the quiet, compounding influence of those who form us. It pairs with On Learning as its complement — where that essay describes the layers a person accumulates, this one honors the people who lay those layers down, and the responsibility that comes with doing so.
It pairs directly with On Learning as the giving end of the same act, and it is written in a register of gratitude rather than analysis. Its claim is that teaching is one of the purest forms of the legible trace: the educator's coherence passes into students and travels forward through lives the teacher will never meet.
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