Best Teachers and Worst Students

Jeff Wilson | He/Him/His | Toronto Buddhist Church

As a teacher, I’m always thinking about teaching and learning. I try to adjust my teaching style year by year, always making improvements if possible. For instance, I’ve removed my attendance policies and most tests, steering more towards reflective assignments that help my students explore the topics and digest what they mean for themselves. And I’ve done away with most hard deadlines too, opting for flexibility so that students can prioritize other classes, work, health, and life as their situations fluctuate.

I’m able to be a professor in the first place because of mentors. They were good teachers, and role models of what a good teacher should be. That was particularly important after they  encouraged me to follow in their footsteps to graduate school. Dr. Taitetsu Unno, who taught Buddhist Studies at Smith College, in Massachusetts, was the biggest influence on me. Every month he would come to share the Dharma at the New York Buddhist Church, and Dr. Unno was a great mentor to me and my wife when we were in our 20s and 30s. Although he passed away years ago, the things he said to me were so important that I remember many of them distinctly, and continue to think about them. In this way, Dr. Unno is actually still teaching me.  And as I age and encounter new situations, I often come to better understand what he meant.

For example, there was something he said that didn’t really resonate with me when I was in my early 20s, but now that I’m a teacher like he was, it’s become very meaningful. Dr. Unno said that the really good teacher doesn’t work with the best student: the best teacher works with the worst student, in order to bring out the student’s best capabilities.

The teacher turns the student into an A student—not on the horizontal, relative plane of A, B, C; the student becomes an A by becoming the most they can be: by being their own A.

This is a really deep observation, one that’s different from how we often approach teaching. 

The idea that the best teacher works with the worst student and makes them the best they can be has several meanings, actually. First, it means that you really do work with your worst student, and value them for who they are, and get them to succeed as best they can. Second, it means that if you treat your worst student this way, you also approach all your other students in the same way: recognizing that they are unique, valuing them for themselves, and helping them to become the best versions of themselves. Third, it means you don’t actually compare your students: if all become A versions of themselves,then they’re all great achievers, and no one is actually better than any other. They’re all valuable and appreciated.

I didn’t understand any of this when Dr. Unno told it to me, because I was just a recent college grad. I was years away from becoming a graduate student, much less a teacher. But now I know it’s really true.

 I’ve had many hundreds of students, but I recall one in particular as my favorite. Not because she was smarter or nicer than my other students (all of whom I appreciate). She was a student-athlete, at college on a sports scholarship. At the end of the first day of class, she came up to me and said, “I’m not very smart, and I don’t get good grades.  I just want to tell you ahead of time, so you’re not disappointed. It’s not that you’re a bad teacher or I’m disrespecting your effort. I’m just not very good. I’m sorry.”

That really struck me. I’d never had a student throw themselves under the bus like that. I wondered what sort of messages she’d been getting her whole life that led to her feeling that way. 

I determined that I was going to make sure that I provided her with extra attention and didn’t demand that she learn in exactly the same way as everyone else. Throughout the term, I encouraged her to visit me at my office, and I gave her extra tutoring. I tried to explain the material to her in terms that were more relatable to her own life, and made connections to what I knew about her experiences. Because she saw me putting effort into her education, she worked extra hard.

In the end, she actually got an A. It was not a very high one, but it was a real A, one of her first ones. She was so happy, she couldn’t believe it. It changed how she thought about herself, and made her much happier with who she was. I still think about that student. That experience always encourages me  to follow Dr. Unno’s teaching and try to help each student become their own best, especially those who think they’re the worst. 

Dr. Unno wasn’t just a professor of Buddhist Studies, he was also a Jodo Shinshu minister. It’s important to pay attention to how his advice came from his deep understanding of the Dharma teachings. What he described wasn’t just how the best teacher helps students at the university. He was also talking about how Jodo Shinshu Buddhism operates in our lives.

The best teacher of all is Amida Buddha, the source of ultimate wisdom.

We often define a buddha as someone who has awakened, but actually that’s not enough. There’s a term for someone who has awakened: they’re an arhat (rakan in Japanese). In order to be a buddha, you not only have to be wise, you also have to mentor others so that they too become liberated from ignorance and suffering. And who are the students that Amida Buddha teaches?

Most other buddhas take the top students, the wise monks who are almost at nirvana already. But Amida Buddha is different: Amida Buddha vowed to help those who are the farthest from nirvana. Amida Buddha embraces the bombu, the foolish, ordinary person, and transforms them. Furthermore, Amida Buddha doesn’t demand that we become straight A students before liberating us. Amida embraces us just as we are, and liberates us just as we are. We become the best version of ourselves through the working of Other Power. So I become the best kind of Jeff Wilson I can be, and you become the best kind of yourself that you can be.

Compared to the ultimate wisdom of the buddha, we’re all the worst students. Yet in the eyes of the buddha, we are all the best, because all of us are embraced and become buddhas just as we are.

I’m so grateful that Amida Buddha embraces me, the worst of all students. In some forms of Buddhism, I would have to become better than I am capable of being. Many paths are designed to help those who are already pretty good at meditating and studying abstract sutras and keeping strict moral precepts at all times. But Jodo Shinshu goes to the worst students and says, you’re good enough. Whoever you are, you’re good enough. You will become a buddha just as you are.

Jodo Shinshu delivers that message because it's rooted in the boundless compassion of the buddha. And leaning on those ideals, learning from the teachings of Dr. Unno, I try to express a measure of that compassion in my experiences with students. May we all have teachers who aspire to help us become the best we can be, just as we are.