Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
Your students are boiling cauldrons of contradictions and three-dimensionality, but so are you.
Again from Brooks's How to Know a Person:
A great way to mis-see people is to see only a piece of them. Some doctors mis-see their patients when they see only their bodies. Some employers mis-see workers when they see only their productivity. We must resist every urge to simplify in this way.
I disagree with just the last sentence. Simplification of people is a necessary and uncontrollable (and extremely beneficial) perspective in many contexts. The admonition to avoid it in all circumstances is actually a mis-seeing of ourselves, as though that's all we do or can do. Yes, no doubt doctors "mis-see their patients when they see only their bodies," but we want doctors to do this, for the most part. And it is mis-seeing them to suppose that such strategic mis-seeing is the only thing they're about.
If you're a teacher, you can't see students holistically on the one hand and yourself narrowly on the other. That's not consistent. Your students are boiling cauldrons of contradictions and three-dimensionality, but so are you. We can worry about how they'll perform on the end-of-grade assessment while also worrying about what kind of person they're turning out to be. If you are focusing in one context on grades and you are accused of mis-seeing, I would argue that it is you that is being mis-seen.
The art historian John Richardson, Pablo Picasso's biographer, was once asked if Picasso was a misogynist and a bad guy. He would not let his subject be oversimplified or robbed of his contradictions. "That's a lot of nonsense," he replied. "Whatever you say about him—you say that he's a mean bastard—he was also an angelic, compassionate, tender, sweet man. The reverse is always true. You say he was stingy. He was also incredibly generous. You say that he was very bohemian, but also he had a sort of up-tight bourgeois side. I mean, he was a mass of antitheses." As are we all.
