by David D. Horowitz.
My memory feels like an underground river. It flows into and just below consciousness as it meanders through my day, which is sometimes spent tutoring. I’m semi-retired but I work part-time as a verbal skills tutor at a nationally franchised learning and test prep center in the Seattle area. My students’ ages range from about eight to fifteen years old, and I feel like I relive those ages every day I work at the center.
Feeling dim memories reemerge can be beneficial, especially when I feel frustrated by youth’s immaturity and bratty misbehavior. I’m reminded of my own classroom behavior. While generally well-behaved, I sometimes made offensive wisecracks, engaged in paper-wad crossfire with other students when the teacher’s back was turned, put a tack on someone’s seat (this was a school-wide fad), gave a teacher the finger behind their back, and mumbled to deliberately distract a teacher. I could be obnoxious. I certainly wasn’t the only student who behaved like this—but as a tutor I keenly reexperience how my teachers must have felt. It reminds me to cultivate deep patience with kids. Empathy does not emerge in a minute, and there is no magic button to turn it on.
Empathy is the path to maturity, and maturity entails seeing a big picture, not merely following selfish impulses. It means being able to sense how others feel so as to minimize needless offense. It means combining honesty and tact and distinguishing self-esteem from egotism. For me, reaching that level of maturity took decades. And during those youthful decades I now recall many inadvertent insults and lost keyrings, friendships, and jobs. I recall the bullying (I endured plenty of it, too), embarrassing blemishes, collapsed plans, and bitter family battles. And slowly—say, about the time I turned thirty-five—I had enough empathetic awareness to tread carefully around others’ egos and enough tact to express myself forcibly without causing needless insult.
I teach my students about recognizing main ideas in essays, about proper punctuation and pronunciation, about sentence and paragraph structure, about vocabulary and diction. Many essays they read convey the importance of cultivating empathy, but we have no empathy textbook. I hope my manner conveys empathy. Some of my students are not particularly mature—but memory, even in traces, reminds me: I wasn’t mature at their age, either. Yes, the gods of patience tap me on the shoulder, and I recall my own youthful foolishness. Our learning center justifiably doesn’t tolerate students being rude or abusive, but my having misbehaved myself helps me address my students’ issues with calm balance. Memory’s river never stops flowing, and some of our least pleasant or proud memories prod us to mature the most.