Furious love
(this is taken from my initial response to a case study taken up today in class on the issue of students who are marginalized because of perceived differences to social norms, ie. poverty, sexual orientation, gender, race).
There is only one, singular commitment a teacher must make to her students: furious love. A step in any other direction is a step down.
Let me unpack what I mean by furious love. First I must acknowledge the term is not my own. It is one I acquired along the way. Credit goes to an indie film-maker, Darren Wilson, who examines various dimensions of furious love enacted in society. Though I do not necessarily subscribe to all his conclusions, I find the term itself captures in a concise and compelling manner the essence of my developing teaching philosophy.
This phrase, furious love best articulates, I believe, the posturing a teacher must embody within the liminal space of the classroom. This is the sacred space in which personhood intersects with the storehouses of discovery. And what occurs within this space is partly determined by a teacher’s commitment to furious love.
What do I mean by furious love?
First, it is a furious devotion to the pursuit of truthful meaning-making. This is always a humble apprenticeship. An ongoing practice driven by a tenacity (often times with fear and trembling) to ask the hard questions. It comes with great risk, for if we are truly willing to ask the hard questions, we must be equally willing to attend to the answers and allow them to transform us.
Second, furious love is the desire to love those in front of us with great extravagance. This comes with great cost. It is the single desire to recognize that people matter. All of them. Every single one. Is this easy? Absolutely not. It is the hardest thing I will ever do as a teacher. It will always be the craft I must constantly nurture. But it is also the necessary threshold that invites me into that liminal space where teachers and students alike become metaphysicians of truth-telling that provokes courage to live whole-hearted lives.
The application of furious love is the compass I will use to help me navigate the complex sociological topography of our second case study. This isn’t really a case about bullying. Bullying is the common term thrown around so often today it has lost all currency. Bullying is merely a symptom of something much more profound that lies at the heart of our interaction with the world. This case reveals the toxic fruit borne from a tree with a much deeper, more poisonous root— our fear of what we do not understand.
All a bunch of airy-fairy hocus pocus? Not a chance. Its the most brutally real thing we can set our hands to do.
Your second point of “furious love ” is something you already possess and what I admire so much about you.