Agony and Ecstasy in Learning: The Topography of Despair

Those of us whose lives and careers are most focused on raising and educating children are confronted daily with the boundless mysteries that emerge along with their growth. It is a constant source of both joy and consternation. I often feel it is consternation that dominates for long segments of time, but leads to and finally pays off in a sometimes unexpected or sudden moment of deep, satisfying joy. Perhaps joy is never so deeply felt as when preceded by frustration and agony, and that there is some proportionality between how agonizing the agony is and how joyful the joy is, like there is between an arrow being pulled back on its string and how far it flies. Joy is always looking back at long sequences of consternations and failures, broken pencil tips, accidentally deleted documents, disciplinary incidents, uncomfortable confrontations, all-nighters, and tear-stained and smeared notebook pages and realizing finally that it was, all of it, part of the very pleasure, wrapped up in it, down to the detail in a way that one simply hadn’t been able to perceive at the time. Joy is the experience of feeling all of those moments at once, the realization that they were all part of one continuous string leading to some unexpected blossom. That all poisons, together, make the elixir of life is one of the secrets of our world.

This is also one of the guiding principles of my educational philosophy. I’m not so sure how it works so much as I just know that it works. From small failures to large ones, students, parents, and teachers constantly come to me when they feel they’re at a tipping point, a decisive failure, the precipice of finality. You can easily tell the difference between a student who failed but at some level, knows it’s because he didn’t really exert his best effort, and one who feels he has tried everything and is now despairing of his intellect and abilities. He has probably been feeling like an impostor for some time, putting on an act to blend in, pretending that carefully rehearsed and premeditated moments of participation in class were spontaneous. But now the cat’s finally out of the bag, he feels he has only fooled himself, and all the rungs on the chain that seemed to out into his future are coming un-snapped, leaving him untethered, unmoored, adrift in a stagnant lake of uncertainty. All this you can see in his eyes, hear in the tone of his voice. The student who knows he can redirect his resources and redouble his efforts and succeed doesn’t have the same quake and quiver in his voice, tragic as any failure may feel.

A teacher who has reached this point doesn’t exude the same emotion-laden physiognomy, since their fear is vicarious, though often deeply tangled together with a dreadful feeling that the failures of the student are due to the shortcomings of the teacher - but it is the same spirit. You of course cannot be a proper teacher if you don’t in some way idolize Anne Sullivan, who famously taught language to Helen Keller, against every odd and without any precedent, and besides is probably the only person in history whose Wikipedia headline simply says, “American teacher.” I see the dark eclipse around a teacher, the great shadow of Anne Sullivan, when they bring not just a concern to me, but also a long list of creative interventions they have tried, of charts, mnemonics, games, documentation, and parent communication. But at the end of it all is this feeling, that one has exhausted one’s resources, but cannot bring forth the desired behavior or performance from the student. Perhaps there is a disability present, something neurological and complex, which has preempted the whole project, rendering it impossible from the start, the teacher sometimes speculates.

Parents feel a blend of agonies, a meritage both of student and teacher varieties, and therefore they do sometimes have a perceptible quaking in the voice; they are in a vicarious role, but one of a much higher degree of sympathetic identity than the teacher. They feel the student’s despair more directly, as they are bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh; they feel the teacher’s also, since they are, indeed, the child’s primary teachers - and both potently enough to fail a breathalyzer. In the quaking voice of the parent at the precipice, there is something unique; it is the history of the child - and on principle, I am inclined to allow and forgive almost any indiscretion committed in a voice saturated in the history of a child, steeped in the actual blood of skinned elbows, papercut fingers, and dripping noses. The desperation of parents comes with an assurance that if it had been within their power to give, it would have already been given ten times; if they had had an answer or a solution to the problem, they would have given it as quickly as they would a lung or a kidney. But the issue at hand often echoes back into the past, and is a reverberation the parents recognize, and they have seen and heard its multitude of permutations affecting the child in all aspects of life, throughout the child’s whole history.

The dread spirit underneath, that of uncertainty itself, always takes the form of an unanswerable question; has the bow bent just too far that its wood has snapped? Is this whole thing a fool’s errand, an infinite jest? If that sounds dramatic to you, it’s probably just because you haven’t felt it recently.

And my response, always translated for the particular moment and situation, is essentially the same: No. Somehow or other, it seems that the material from which we are made is as unsnappable as we believe it is.

It isn’t the end, unless you let it be. The beads all scattered on the floor suddenly collect together as the pulling of a string reveals that secret and exotic jewelry only recognizable as your wild and unlikely life. The bow unbows, and the stored tension from sometimes years of mounting anxiety and consternation releases, letting loose a lithe and lethal arrow that is a joy to behold.

I’ve seen it just too many times to count, and just about too many times to doubt. I think we all know it, at some level, and even so, it’s one of those things we could be reminded of every day and still sometimes forget. In fact, it’s written into all our TV shows, movies, and music; that there is always a secret pathway, a hidden door, an invisible thread running all through and pointing somewhere new. 

I know it sounds abstract - most stories that apply to everyone take on the character of metaphor or conceit. And I say all this because in my career as an educator, the reality is that of the greatest successes I’ve ever seen, from students, teachers, and parents, none of them have come from any brilliant pedagogical strategy or particular virtue of my own, but rather every one of them, one hundred percent, have resulted from replacing the thought, “there is no way,” with “there is a way,” or even just, “there might be a way.” It’s certainly not a scientific fact, but it has to have been the fundamental disposition of anyone who ever accomplished anything admirable - certainly Anne Sullivan. And it is a testable hypothesis. Try it out; especially if you don’t believe it. You may feel a failure at every turn, like everything you touch goes up in flames - pretend you believe. Act like you do. Do the things that someone who did would do. You’ll see what happens. You’ll find the evidence by creating it - and one day you’ll look back upon a long string of fires and see how it blazed a path up the mountain, opened the way for others to follow, and provides a lovely light besides.