With the events of September 11th, I felt an overwhelming need to reach out to my students. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. A shared and equal space was established by the shared and equal horror and trauma of the national tragedy. I no longer defined "relationship" in terms of the conventional constraints and hierarchy between teacher and student. I reached to the high school students I met in a summer institute at UCLA, as well as all the students I was able to contact from the past. I found that these contacts were based on the authentic dialogue of shared events and feelings rather than the limited, cautious school-based roles of teacher and students. I actually felt safer with these relationships than when I had approached similar authenticity around conventional school matters.

This new experience of teacher-student relationships has pushed me to new understandings of teaching. Too often we teach for the love of the material, but not for the love of the students. The student should be primary. Without addressing the concerns of the student, without addressing the baggage a student brings to the classroom, the material we preach will be lost on deaf ears. I realize that the students will always have some issue or concern to overcome and if I, as a teacher, try to address each concern the material will be lost. The students’ lives need to be the material. I am advocating that we teach students how to think and not what to think, that we equip them to deal with their own concerns.

A teacher is a revolutionary. A revolution is a change in the way things are organized. As we teach we create revolution because we change patterns of thought. Cognitive psychology and developmental psychology tell us that the adolescent locks in on the first possible solution to a problem and once equipped with this possible solution, will not explore new possibilities. (Myers, 1999) The role of a teacher is to re-open the evaluation process and have the students begin to practice exploring different options, and when faced with different viable alternative solutions, use critical analysis and reflection to choose the direction of their life. As William Ayres writes, a teacher calls students to look beyond the reality of the moment.

A teacher is a revolutionary... A teacher is an activist... A teacher is an advocate for love... A teacher is a friend.

A teacher is an activist. A teacher has to lead by example. One of the jobs a teacher must face is dealing with the structural inequities of the school itself. The students must see and understand the fight that the teacher is fighting – the fight for the students. The students are in search of allies. If the student can see you fighting for them, they will better be able to address the inequities and injustice in their own lives, because it gives their lives worth. A teacher is an advocate for love. Love is not just a feeling; it is an action. Love begins in the classroom. bell hooks talks about love as "the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth." The ways in which we open the curriculum up to a student or a group of students is the first way that I can express my love to a student. If I am trying to help nurture a student’s growth, I need to empower that student to leave her/his comfort zone and work on areas in their lives that are not strengths. Antonia Darder (1996), when speaking of Freire’s indispensable qualities of a teacher, mentions the phrase "patient impatience." I would like to invent the phrase "comfortable uncomfortness" as a state of being that I am trying to achieve in the classroom. I want to create an environment where a student feels comfortable being uncomfortable. If a student is a great test taker and cannot work with other students, I need to provide areas in which they will be working in groups. Each student is an individual and needs to be treated as such. When I address each student as an individual, I express my love for each student and thus help each student grow.

A teacher is a friend. A student told me recently, "Mr. Williams, we were given a survey and I wrote that you were the only teacher that I would come to if I had a problem." This is the greatest compliment that I could have received as a teacher. I now understand that friendship does not end the last day of school. When my student came back and needed to talk to a friend about the most important decision of her life, she chose me, and all of my comforts left and that was fitting because I was comfortably uncomfortable. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart." There are only a few teachers with whom I spent time and I can, to this day, recall some of the lessons that I learned while in their presence. When in situations that I do not understand, it is their voice that I hear. If one day, 10 years from now, one of my students looks back and remembers something they learned while in my presence, if they hear my voice when confronting a problem, if their thought patterns change, then I will have left a footprint. I will be a teacher.