Chronic illness forced me to reassess my approach to teaching
What I learned from Henry Adams and Anne Sullivan about adapting
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For more than 30 years, I stood in front of classrooms in two states, teaching history. I knew how to read a room and pace a lesson while making the Missouri Compromise seem worth the attention of high schoolers. Then myasthenia gravis (MG) permanently changed my schedule without permission.
The stamina a classroom demands became a negotiation with a body that no longer answered every request. So it grew clear to me that full-time classroom teaching was no longer an option. I left my career earlier than planned. The necessity to reinvent my life was not only apparent, it was essential. I never expected that at this age, I would need to learn how to teach to a new audience: me.
It is a strange kind of homework. I am the veteran and the novice all at once. I know exactly what a good lesson feels like from the inside of three decades of delivering them, and yet none of that muscle memory transfers cleanly to an online classroom, where a student’s face is a small rectangle and a discussion can die in the silence of a muted mic. I had to relearn pacing. Now that I cannot see feet shifting or eyes wandering to the clock, my radar no longer functions properly. MG didn’t just change what my body can do, it changed my understanding of teaching.
Near the end of his long career in education, Henry Adams wrote a masterpiece of American literature. One line from it has resonated since my first read: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Adams wrote that in “The Education of Henry Adams,” a book about his own repeated reeducation. Late in life, he realized how much he still had to learn and discover.
‘There is a season’
At a time when I thought I’d be sitting on a beach sipping tropical drinks from coconuts, I’m being reeducated by a chronic illness. My body at the front of a room isn’t how I can teach. Teaching only requires showing, however that might look.
Think of Helen Keller, who is remembered as a student before anything else. Keller had to relearn how to perceive the world through touch and spelling in a palm, guided by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, who had to relearn teaching in a way no one had successfully done before. Keller went on to earn a college degree and to teach the world something about persistence that no lecture could. Her story isn’t really about overcoming blindness and deafness. It’s about the fact that education — real education — has never depended on the method staying fixed. It depends on somebody’s willingness to find a new way when the old way closes.
A Bible passage comes to mind: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” I used to think that verse was mostly about grief, about the seasons that take something away. But it cuts both ways. There is a time to teach in a classroom with chalk dust in the air, and evidently there is a time to teach through a laptop camera, adjusting to a body that has its own opinions about the day’s schedule. Neither season is lesser. They’re just different instruments for the same purpose.
I’ve had to build in rest before a lesson instead of after one and accept that some days the best I can offer is a well-prepared recording instead of my live, in-the-moment self. That’s a hard trade for someone who built a career on being fully present in a room. But I think of Adams’ eternity line and Sullivan spelling letters into a child’s palm until something clicked. Influence was never really about the classroom. It was about the teacher’s willingness to keep finding a way to show up.
I’m back at the beginning of something new. Learning, again, how to teach. I suspect that’s a season a lot of you reading this understand better than most. Those who live with chronic illness understand the particular discipline of adapting a life’s work to a body that has changed the terms. If there’s a lesson in it, it’s the one Ecclesiastes has been offering all along: The purpose doesn’t end when the season does. It just asks for a new way in.
Note: Myasthenia Gravis News is strictly a news and information website about the disease. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website. The opinions expressed in this column are not those of Myasthenia Gravis News or its parent company, Bionews, and are intended to spark discussion about issues pertaining to myasthenia gravis.
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