THE CLASSROOM

Aaron had a gift. It wasn’t the kind that allows you to detect a lie or speak in tongues, but it was a gift regardless. He could make seemingly complicated ideas sound like they were in black and white. He used words to explain complex systems as pieces of puzzles, turning banal subjects into fascinating mysteries and engineering students into philosophy enthusiasts. On paper, Aaron had a real talent for teaching. The problem was that, when he stood before a class full of students, the gift evaporated. He would sweat profusely, and his voice would tremble.

It wasn’t that Aaron didn’t know his stuff. He understood his area of expertise intimately and described his passion for it during our coffee break that day. He talked for an hour about everything under the sun, from the human brain to ecosystems to ancient civilisations, explaining, engaging, and inspiring. But at the front of the classroom, under the illuminated aegis of performance acumen, terror crept in with a strange clot of free-floating anxiety, and he found himself unable to speak.

Aaron tried every therapeutic trick he could think of—deep breathing, visualisation, even a week-long public speaking course. Nothing helped. His pupils and colleagues couldn’t understand why someone so clever and engaging was so distressed about teaching. ‘You just need to relax,’ they said. He couldn’t, not in his afflicted classroom; that place felt like Dunkirk, the beach at Normandy, where he was under heavy fire.

One day, during class, when he was having a particularly tough day, Aaron saw a flyer for a workshop on community gardening. He hadn’t been particularly interested in gardening, but he decided to sign up in the hopes that it would relieve some of his stress by getting him out of the building. The workshop was held in the tranquil community garden.

I felt like I was with someone in his element, with fragrant earth under his boots, passing leaves rustling around him, his infectious passion for sustainable agriculture, and his fieldy, tree-lish, peer-centred vernacular. We were out walking and talking, with all the energy that these activities bring. 

But as he dug in the soil with the other participants, side by side, planting seeds, transplanting shoots, and clearing weeds, he knew he could teach in a way that he could no longer do in the classroom. He could give away his gift in a garden, a park, or at community centres. By holding informal workshops, doing projects in the soil and in the streets, and sharing stories and food, he could teach by doing, by engaging all five senses, and by listening.

He began, beginning small, with a compost workshop for his apartment complex, then nature walks for neighbourhood kids. His fight-or-flight response, long dormant, began to recede. It was replaced by fearlessness, yes, but not quite the kind that accompanies paralysis. He was nervous, of course. But he was nervous about something he loved to do. 

Aaron, the reluctant classroom teacher, found his voice, his passion, and his calling. "How is it that I can teach anyone, anywhere, at any time?" he asked himself. It turns out that it all boils down to that one extraordinary thing and the willingness to share it with anyone, anywhere, anytime—a teacher and all that they can be.