Gift Exchange

I have been on the receiving end of many gifts in my life. What a gift my family has been to me! What joy they bring to me each day. My home has been a gift that has brought to me a sense of place and a haven of rest. Throughout my life, teachers—my spouse, my son, my daughter, my parents, my brother—have taught me what it means to give and receive love. And it is the idea of gift exchange that has caused me to strive to teach better in my university classroom. After all, my calling as a teacher is a gift in itself.

I think of my own teachers: Mrs. Bradford in a seminary kindergarten, Mrs. Eubanks in first grade, Mr. Harding, a victim of polio who inspired me in the seventh grade to learn History, Hugh Ridenour, who inspired me in high school to teach History, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Wardin and Dr. Chamlee in undergraduate school, all models of caring professionalism, and Dr. Garrett and Dr. Nelli in graduate school who took a special interest in me and saw in me something that I did not see. These teachers showered me with gifts—gifts of learning and inspiration. How I wish I could tell them thank you in a way that would convey to them the depth of my gratitude.

What if I could go back and be a student again, listening to a story on the oval, braided rug of my kindergarten classroom, running down the hill of the playground at Oaklawn Elementary School, walking the halls at Webster County High, soaking in the lectures in undergraduate school, or talking with my professors in corner offices in graduate school. How much more I could learn! In P. F. Kluge's Alma Mater, the author went back to teach at his old school, Kenyon College in Ohio. There he had lunch one day with a new colleague, an English professor, who opened the conversation with the observation that "this is my twenty-second year of teaching Tintern Abbey." The English professor bore the repetition by making each reading in each new class fresh, and by looking on teaching as a gift exchange. "I have this romantic idea of teaching as gift exchange," he told Kluge. "What matters is if I reach a few students at a level that transforms them and gets them to see the world in a different way. Gift exchange. Sure, teaching is method and information, but it's something else, a gift, an enrichment of your life, a transformation that you spend the rest of your life discovering."