Between Teacher & Student - Reflections from an Honors English Classroom

English literature is a part of the Living Wisdom Wholeness Curriculum, the central hub of an Education for Life, aimed at cultivating not only knowledge but deep wisdom.

Greetings, Friends.

Welcome to a new term at Living Wisdom —a school rooted in the understanding that education is about who we become, and how we use the knowledge we acquire to uplift ourselves and the world around us. Here, values and life skills are not taught separately from academics, but are woven directly into the daily work of learning and life.

Math, in this sense, is about more than logic —it is a vehicle for clear communication and self-expression. Literature is about far more than literary analysis. It is one of the places in our curriculum where deep questions of character, values, and meaning naturally arise and where wisdom can be uncovered. In this month’s blog, we share two essays from our Honors English class: one written by Teacher Keshava, and one by a student in response to Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Together, they offer a glimpse into how learning unfolds at Living Wisdom as a dynamic exchange between teacher and student.

In his essay, Keshava reflects on curiosity as the root of continual growth—not only as an intellectual habit, but as a way of staying awake to life itself. Adah’s essay, written in response, reveals how deeply that attitude of inquiry can be received. She centers her reflections on the relationship between Abbé Faria and Dantès. Adah recognizes education as an inheritance: the transmission of knowledge and consciousness from one generation to the next.

These pieces, when read together, convey a central theme of our Education for Life approach: that true education is relational, meaningful, and alive; and it is oriented toward the pursuit of wisdom and truth. May they invite you to pause and consider the deeper value of learning, and open a window for you into the kind of inner growth that wisdom-centered education can inspire.

Warmly,

Kshama

Curiosity - The Key to Continual Growth

by Keshava Betts

I had a professor in college who changed my life. The first time I saw him, he strode into the room in a white t-shirt, blue jeans, a pair of leather boots that screamed “man’s-man”, and a smile that could have won the heart of a stone-statue. The awaiting students turned to watch him enter, wondering what the first words of this utterly winning man would be. “It smells like farts in here,” he said, his voice booming through the small studio with a confidence that would have filled an auditorium of ten-thousand. This was my first introduction to Ben Mathes, a master of bathos, but also the most profound professor I ever had. He taught me to act, to truly read, to understand, to make art, but (as he might have said)—darn it!—he taught me so much more than that: he taught me that the value of a student was determined by the questions they asked.

You see, Ben was charismatic: he was loud, funny, smart—brilliant, even—and had rare insight into the workings of the human mind. It would be easy for some people, enamored by his persona, to lose track of what he was saying in light of what he was—but that was the elegant part: he was what he talked about, and I wanted to know how to become like him, not simply content myself with listening to him. At first, I didn’t quite know where to start—I’d want to ask questions, in part just to hear him talk, but when the hawk-like intensity of his gaze would lock onto me I’d feel a burning need to avoid asking just any question, but to ask a real question: something that would really change me, something that might really change the whole group of students listening.

Ben would often say that, “the quality of a room is determined by the questions asked in it,” and I strove to do my best to make whatever room he taught in the best room I’d ever been in. I’d listen so carefully to everything he said, every idea, every nuance, pleading with my heart to come up with an original insight that might spark some further renaissance of exposition from him. I’d go home after his lectures and think. I’d mull over the ideas, the arguments, the logic—the ramifications! I’d try expressing the ideas to others—anything to give me an edge, to lift another corner I hadn’t yet considered. But the better I got at hunting for answers, the more questions I found to replace them.

More questions. That was also a gift from Ben. Ben would scold me when I presumed I knew something just because I could define it. He’d ask me, “Keshava, why do you think this character acts this way?” and I’d say something—probably dumb—like, “‘Cause his Mom left him when he was a kid,” And…He’d just look at me and shake his head. 

We have to learn to ask questions that lead to more questions. The moment you close the door on wonderment is the moment you stop growing and the moment you start dying.

Death doesn’t just occur when you breathe your last. Dying is when your life-force starts imploding back on itself, rather than expanding outwards into new horizons, awarenesses, adventures, and understandings. Curiosity is the fountain of youth. Stop thinking you know stuff: you don’t. You only know the beginning and that’s the good part.

Humility before mystery unites the great minds of all disciplines. The exponents of science are the humblest before the awesome power of the universe; the wisest sage is the first to extol the greatness of the mystery of the Divine. Maybe we’re the ones who are wrong when we presume to know the mysteries of creation?

Mystery is the source of curiosity, the seed of understanding. Without mystery, the mind idles and disintegrates. Blasé to even the greatest wonders, we begin to think this incredible reality we inhabit to be dull—what hubris! In order to judge something as unimpressive or unremarkable we must be capable of understanding it completely, a thing we are so rarely capable of, yet we cast our reductions about, freely, as final arbiters of truth. We compartmentalize the wonders of life, of creation, of humanity, into tidy little boxes which we label and presume to understand. But do we?

The moment you judge something, you stop loving it. To love something means to believe in its potential—to wonder at how beautiful it might yet become. When you presume to know someone so deeply that nothing about them is a mystery to you anymore, that is the moment your love for them dies. People change. The world changes. Plants grow. Babies become men and women who may one day be so much greater than even you are now.

Ben taught me to be curious. To set aside the attractive posture of trying to be an expert. Don’t be an expert, be an amateur—someone who does it for the love of the thing, because they can’t put it down, because they love it so much they give themselves to their craft, someone who is so engrossed in asking questions they forget to even bother thinking about whether other people call them an expert. Ben taught me to seek to see things from the inside-out, from the heart of a matter: to get inside a subject, to become it. As Krishna says, “To the knower of Brahman (the Supreme Spirit), the Vedas [scriptures] are of no more use than a well when the land all around is in flood.” (Bhagavad-Gita, 2:46)

When I first visited Ben’s private acting studio, I saw some incredible acting and I heard him coach the community of actors who were a part of his team. After the first hour, or so, during a break, Ben stepped outside with me to see how I liked the class, if I had questions, that sort of thing:

“How do you like the class? Any questions?”

“It’s wonderful. But—I’m on to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the past hour you’ve quoted the Bible once and the Bhagavad-Gita twice. You’re not teaching acting, you’re teaching people how to live.”

A sly smile spread over the face of the acting teacher.

“Yeah,” he said, “But don’t tell anyone. It’s better when they don’t realize it.”

Curiosity isn’t just about becoming better at text analysis—though it will take you deeper in understanding everything from the words of Moses to the ridiculous romps of Molière—curiosity is about learning to see the world in a new light, to see yourself in a new light. Who knows? Maybe there’s more? Perhaps asking the right questions is the key to discovering your own potential, what to speak of a book’s, or an author’s? What if human knowledge isn’t quite as complete as some of us think it to be? Could it be that this world is such a magnificent, wonderful, exquisite place that if you blink—you’ll miss something? But maybe we’re not supposed to know everything. Maybe we’re supposed to wonder, just a bit.

Parents of the Mind

by Adah, 11th grade

Your teachers are the parents of your mind. They fill your mind’s library with books and take you by the hand to guide you through its shelves. They give meaning to the stars when you look up at the night sky. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Abbe Faria is Dantés’ teacher and pedagogical father. Although Abbe Faria never lives to see his treasure, his story is not a tragedy because his intellectual son enjoyed his success and by so doing, Faria fulfilled his last mission from God, to bring Dantés from a boy to a man.

A teacher’s duty is to give their students their inheritance of the knowledge of this world. Inheritance is usually means something that has monetary value, but for Dantés, a student, it is knowledge and wisdom. During their time together, Faria gives Dantés all his knowledge. “[W]hen I have taught you mathematics, physics, history and the three or four modern languages I speak, you will know everything that I know.” (Dumas 168). Dantés receives this as a gift as valuable as monetary inheritance: 

“Moreover, my true treasure, my friend, is not the one that awaits me under the dark rocks of Monte Cristo, but your presence, and the time that we spend together for five or six hours a day, in spite of our jailer; it is those rays of understandings that you have shone into my brains and the languages which you have implanted in my memory which now grow there, putting out further branches of languages in their turn. The many sciences that you have brought within your grasp by the depth of your own knowledge and the clarity of basic principles that you have derived from them – that is my treasure, my friend, that is what you have given to make me rich and happy. Believe me, and console yourself; this is worth more to me than tons of gold and trunkloads of diamonds.” (Dumas 188). 

Abbé Faria gives Dantés two inheritances: the riches of his mind and the riches hidden on the isle of Monte Cristo. But even then, the transfer of riches was not a matter of handing over a boatload of money but rather the knowledge needed to find the wealth himself.

The successful, the golden, teacher—or parent— is one whose student is more successful than they ever were. Abbé Faria never got to see his treasure, but his student did. When Dantés protests that he is not Faria’s heir and thus has no claim to the treasure after Faria dies, his teacher responds:  “You are my son, Dantés!...You are the child of my captivity. My priestly office condemned me to celibacy: God sent you to me both to console the man who could not be a father and the prisoner who could not be free.” (186) 

Dantés is an extension of Faria’s aspiration, a fulfillment of Faria’s desire for a son and for freedom; Though the abbe would never see the light of a free world, in the success of Dantes, he was victorious.

Although Faria’s life bears the wounds and scars of many tragedies, his final chapter is triumphant. Faria’s hopes—for a son, for the riches on the isle of Monte Cristo—are fulfilled through his student. Dantes, in receiving what the abbe had to offer, gave him his final prize: a sense of completion: Dantes would succeed where he could not, Dantes might enjoy what he could not. The best way to thank our teachers, then, is to fulfill their hopes for us. In the same way we carry the genes and name of our family, we carry the knowledge and aspirations of our teachers.

Work Cited

Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte Cristo (Penguin Classics). Translated by Robin Buss, Penguin Publishing Group, 2003.