From time to time, my students come to me bearing gifts,
gifts that any history professor would appreciate. One student brought to me a copy of an old
family letter, a description of a great great grandfather’s experience in the
trenches on the Western Front in World War I.
Another student brought to me a Civil War bayonet, an artifact that I
continue to show to my students each semester.
Yet another student brought to me ration stamps from World War II. I cherish these gifts from students, and I
share them with my other students year after year. Students, though, have showered me with gifts
of another sort, gifts that characterize the real value of the
teaching/learning experience.
I have been on the receiving end of many gifts throughout my
life. Alicia Knight, my next door
neighbor, and God recently gave me the gift of life itself. What a gift my family has been to me! What joy they bring to me each day. My home has been a gift that has brought to
me a sense of place and a haven of rest.
Throughout my life, teachers—Evelyn, my son, my daughter, my parents, my
brother—have taught me what it means to give and receive love. And it is the idea of gift exchange that has
caused me to strive to teach better in my university classroom. After all, my calling as a teacher is a gift
in itself.
I think of my school and college teachers: Mrs. Bradford in a seminary kindergarten;
Mrs. Eubanks in first grade; Roy Pullam, in his first year of teaching whose
excitement for the profession was infectious; Mr. Harding, a victim of polio,
who inspired me in the seventh grade to learn History; Hugh Ridenour, who
inspired me in high school to teach History;
Bob Gillaspie, who taught me to love literature and writing, and Janice
Gillaspie, who comforted me through mathematics and life. Dr. C. Pat
Taylor and Dr. Albert Wardin and Dr. Roy Z. Chamlee in undergraduate
school, all models of caring professionalism, and Dr. James Leo Garrett and Dr.
Bill Pitts and Dr. Bert Nelli in graduate school who took a special interest in
me and saw in me something that I did not see in myself. These teachers showered me with gifts, gifts
of learning and inspiration. How I wish
I could tell them thank you in a way that would convey to them the depth of my
gratitude.
What if I could go back and be a student again, listening to
a story on the oval, braided rug of my kindergarten classroom, running down the
hill of the playground at Oaklawn Elementary School, walking the halls of
Webster County High, soaking in the lectures at Belmont University, or talking
with my professors in corner offices in graduate school at Baylor and the
University of Kentucky.
How much more I could learn!
In P. F. Kluge’s Alma Mater, the author went back to teach at his old
school, Kenyon College in Ohio. There he
had lunch one day with a new colleague, an English professor, who opened the
conversation with the observation that “this is my twenty-second year of
teaching `Tintern Abbey.’” The English
professor overcame the repetition by making each reading in each new class
fresh, and by looking on teaching as a gift exchange. “I have this romantic idea of teaching as
gift exchange,” he told Kluge. “What
matters is if I reach a few students at a level that transforms them and gets
them to see the world in a different way.
Gift exchange. Sure, teaching is
method and information, but it’s something else, a gift, an enrichment of your
life, a transformation that you spend the rest of your life discovering.”
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