— Midweek Meditations:
thoughts, inspiration and encouragement
from ACF community members —
The Special Research Consortium on Heroism and the Heroic that I have been a part of for the past 10 years is closing its doors, having run its full course. For the past four years, my own project has been working hard finding ways to transmit scholarly findings about heroes and heroines into school programs. One of the side effects of the research we did in this context was the insight that most kids will readily name their parents, siblings, other relatives, close friends and even their pet gerbils – in that order — as their personal heroes, along with the usual suspects from emergency rooms, rescue teams, and fire departments. One group that used to appear prominently on lists as recently as the 1990s, however, sports heroes, has all but evaporated. And one group was hardly named at all: teachers.
The overwhelming vote for parents et al. is understandable against the background of life in Western consumerist societies, as aggravated by Covid_19. Life itself suddenly appeared more precious, and besides, the main reason many of these kids gave for their vote was that the nominees had been there for them. Quality time – parents and siblings had taken time out of their busy lives to attend to the kids’ problems, to be with them.
So why were teachers not named more often? During the various lockdowns they weathered the storms of sometimes irrational regulations, learned superfast to deal with unfamiliar online-meeting programs that still don’t work flawlessly, or even designed modes and methods to stay in touch with their students themselves. They held on and suffered and muddled through, made themselves available, tried not to lose their students to depression, or endless computer gaming, or both. Which according to one of our scholars who wrote a programmatic paper on what makes a hero / heroine, Tobias Schlechtriemen, definitely qualifies as heroic. So why were they not mentioned more often?
We spent hours pondering this seemingly inexplicable enigma, without much success, until one of the original 10th graders we polled in 2021, now a student at the university, observed that we made a mistake: our research team did not distribute and collect the poll sheets themselves, but gave them to teachers to handle. Very few students wanted to be caught praising, leave alone heroifying, the person who collected the papers — and obviously would be able to see the results! That would have been so uncool.
Asked directly, this student had a lot of good things to say about their teachers. So we now suspect that a different research method might have yielded the results we expected: that teachers were heroes during the late unpleasantness, and that their continuous struggle, every day, against the dark arts, against ignorance, against indolence, against over-regulations and underachievement, was and is noted by their students, and appreciated. After all, teachers leave an imprint on us, fortunately more often positive than negative. Teachers sometimes see us more regularly and more and longer times during the day than family members and friends. Teachers are important, now, and all the way back to the carpenter from Galilee who is called nothing more often in the NT than that: rabbi. Teacher.
The ACF Midweek Meditations
are written by a diverse group of our church members with the intention to seek God’s fingerprints in our lives. They range from somber to humorous and are inspired by all facets of live and faith. Written by ordinary people from all walks of life, they reflect a wide range of Christian backgrounds and spiritualities.
Each week’s text portrays the individual viewpoint of its author. They might not always resonate with everyone, and are not meant to be understood as representing the Anglican Church Freiburg as a whole. Yet, as a church that is aiming to ‘Build a Community of Grace’ we seek to practice learning from and listening to one another.
We pray that these humble ponderings add a small spark of blessing to your week.
Freiburg Anglican Church 