A little boy was filling me in on what he learned at school. I had never been to his school, didn't know his friends or his teacher, so it was all new to me. This was all well and good until I demonstrated my ignorance on one particular topic.
"Don't you know who Hashem is?" he asked.
"No," I confessed.
"Why Hashem, he created this table. He made that chair you're sitting on...."
As my student went on to list the amazing achievements of Hashem, emphatically extolling the virtues and educating me, I realized he was talking about the entity I would call God. In utter disbelief, this little boy caught me up to speed on what I needed to know to get by. He had to teach his tutor.
My first thought was that I just told this little boy that I didn't know who God was that I was ignorant to the concept of a creator. I might as well have been an alien arriving from another planet, maybe another dimension. Here, I was an authority math and reading, but I didn't really know anything.
Now, he wasn't proselytizing. He wasn't coercing me to convert or selling me on the idea. He was explaining something he understood and sharing something that was important to him and his family. That was what made it special. Education should always be about the sharing of knowledge and experiences, never indoctrination.
What I did witness was a little boy come to life as he found someone in need of learning and he had the information, and the responsibility, as well as the joy of enlightening me. Playing my part as a student when I teach opens up a dialogic discourse (Freire)in which I am ready and willing to learn from my student.
Watching the little boy come to life as he, the relative expert, informed me reminded me of how wonderful it feels to teach as well as the unique relationship between an educator and student.
It started because I was unaware of the name this boy used for the creator of all. In other words I don't know everything.
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