Beginner’s Mind

When I was a new teacher, I happened to read that classic 1980s writing manual, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I’ve adapted and often use one of the exercises described in that book—The Samurai—when I am working with students on revision, probably because it’s been very useful for me in my own work.  As its dramatic name suggests, the Samurai exercise encourages us to do a crucial but immensely difficult writing task: take the sword to our own beloved writing and cut the extraneous bits, no matter how attached to our brilliant turns of phrase we have become.  If you can surrender to this mindset, the exercise really does work—but eliminating writing we love, even if we don’t need it anymore, can be painful at best.

But as we have started the semester, I’ve returned to another phrase from this Buddhist-y book, the idea of cultivating something called “beginner’s mind,” with which we encounter even the familiar as something new. Can this work in the literature classroom? Sheridan Blau would argue not only that it can work, but that allowing true beginners—our students—the privilege of a more immediate encounter with a literary text that is unmediated (at least for the moment) by the teacher/expert, is crucial to student engagement and learning.

Certainly, an experienced teacher who really knows a text is in an ideal position to make this kind of student-centered, beginner’s mind learning happen.  We may try to step back from the text to let the students go at it, but we are still there exerting our authority.  And it helps if, as Blau’s students are, the students in question are motivated to succeed academically (if only in terms of grades/teacher approval), even if they already have, as Blau puts it, come to see themselves as failed readers if they do not “get” everything about a text on the first try. Students who see themselves as successful students (even if they see themselves as bad readers or writers) will be motivated to please a teacher like Blau enough, I think, to play along with his methods and give him what he wants.

But what if you are actually a beginning teacher? What if, for you, that beginner’s mind is not something you cultivate in a Buddhist practice kind of way, but the reality of your experience—and something you feel makes you an impostor in the classroom?  It’s one thing for an experienced and vetted college professor, especially one with rank and tenure, to cultivate a beginner’s mind; it’s quite another for a real beginner to do the same—and to do it without any of the safety nets of institutional position or appearance like age, race, or gender that mark those of authority, brilliance, and power in an academic setting.

If we don’t feel we truly have authority, many of us will try to fake it (okay, perform it) trying to dress and otherwise act the part of the role we are trying to learn. Young teachers often find themselves needing to assert a more authoritarian persona—strict rules, adherence to policies, little flexibility—when they feel they have the least authority.  This is so much the norm we could call it developmental. Yet in the same way we might go back to an old diary and cringe at naive insights that seemed so earth-shattering at the time, these authoritarian moments—especially when our persona overwhelms our own humanity—are often the most cringe-worthy of an experienced teacher’s career.

The sad fact is that experience only comes with time.  The happy fact is that beginning teachers can be some of the very best teachers—not because they don’t make mistakes (we all do, no matter how experienced), not because they are closer to many students in age, cultural expertise, or technological platform (although I think these affinities can absolutely be assets in the classroom. Beginning teachers have a special ability to listen, because they haven’t heard it all before. Beginning teachers have a special capacity for empathy, because they are often students themselves. And beginning teachers have a special sense for possibility—because, after all, with a blank slate, anything is possible.