I am teaching composition this term, and the first major project in my 101 sections was a personal essay. As I grade student submissions this weekend, I am struck by the powerful role a good instructor has in the lives of his/her students. And in this case, I define a good instructor as one who is a trustworthy, caring person. Because such a person creates a place of safety where his/her students feel free to open up, share, and grow at deeper levels.

Reflecting on my own educational experiences, I can immediately think of a few teachers who did NOT make me feel safe with their communication style, classroom environment, methods of discipline, or cold personal demeanor. At the same time, I can easily name a number of other teachers who made me feel safe to learn, create, ask, seek, and simply be myself under their watch. Whether or not I was able to express that sense of trusting and safety in the assignments I completed for them, it remained in my heart and influenced both my academic performance and my personal development – ultimately inspiring me to be an instructor and teacher mentor.

Back to the essays, then. Wow! I’ve only communicated with these students for a few weeks. And some of them are being instructed online so I don’t even know what they look like; we’ve never met in person. Yet, here they are, writing about all kinds of past experiences. They had complete freedom to explore the topics of their choice. But the number of students who chose to write about deeply personal experiences – some of them painful, scary, or even traumatic – surprised me.

And in a way it blessed me. As their instructor, I felt like they were saying, “Here’s a piece of who I am. And I’m trusting you to hold it with respectfully gentle hands and grade my work with great care.”

Perhaps it is my joint background in counseling and education that helps me to notice the beauty of this – and the overwhelming responsibility of it. I do not take it lightly, and I thank God for the opportunity to embrace each essay and treat each student with dignity even while I must, by design, provide a critique of their work.

True: this may happen more readily in courses like English and psychology, where communication and personal exploration are often encouraged (as compared to physics or algebra, for example). Yet I think there is a reminder in my observation for every teacher, no matter what we teach and no matter how old our students are.

Let us stop and take stock today, considering carefully how we view and treat those we instruct. And let us do our best to provide a good, safe space for them to enter into. A place where real development will take root and seeds of hope will sprout into blossoms of confident maturity.