Learning How to Die

I have been sitting on this post for awhile. Mostly because this time of year is crazy, but also to let my thoughts take form. To begin, this post is not about how to end your life. If you stumbled here in search of things of such nature, my words are only of hope, peace, and life.

The phrase, "Learning How to Die," is stolen from a song I love by Jon Foreman (of Switchfoot):



That line of the song has been rolling around in my head for the past couple of weeks. What does it mean to ,"Learn how to die?" In this culture, it would seem almost absurd for someone to live their life to become obsolete. The thing is, as teachers our job should be directed at our extinction. One of goals from day one in my class is about phasing myself out. What do you mean? I mean that I try to daily become less vital to the long term outcome of my class. I would like to picture that one day, my students would walk in, begin their learning, questioning, and discovering and never realize that I wasn't there. I am not talking about bogging students down with busy work. I am talking about making students self-sufficient and about them taking ownership in their learning.
If we are honest, it takes a good amount of dying to yourself to give up the roles we take as teachers. We like the stage. We enjoy being the "Deliverers of Knowledge." The problem is that learning that is all teacher directed is often a breeding ground for passive students. We create avenues where kids store everything in their short term memory for quick test regurgitation. Are kids going to naturally pick up the torch and run? I would say no. They will in time, grab the torch firmly and run farther than what you dreamed if you teach them to. When this happens, we just get to be a fan in the crowd. If we are lucky, we are maybe a coach on the track, but our goal should never be about being noticed.
Again, I am guilty of often setting the bar quite high, but I think I have this one right. Teach your kids like you will be dead in a month or two. Teach like their will be no substitute.


To measure you are doing, record how much time your students can spend in quality learning without your directives and prompting. If all learning hinges on your presence, you may have to start learning how to die. I would love to hear about ways your students run the classroom. Please share in the comments.