Why Do You Think You Need To Be Anyone Else?

I hate goodbyes. So I avoid them. I send texts or other notes because I am incredibly awkward with most emotions.

This is a grainy picture of Jon Quam and me from last year. For almost three decades, he’s guided and directed the National Teacher of the Year program for the Council of Chief State School Officers. I’m his last NTOY; he’s retiring this month. Because I couldn’t be in Washington, D.C. for his recognition, I’m doing what I can: writing for him.

For me, Jon was/is like my own Zen monk. In some ways, that’s been maddening because he rarely gives me directions, like I want, and few answers. When I want advice, he gives only more questions. And thank God for that.

Not very far into my NTOY year, there was a moment that, in hindsight, seems so simple, yet it illustrates Jon’s unique ability to get to the center of what’s important. We had come from — for me — a difficult interview. The details aren’t important except one: I knew that I had drifted out far from myself during it. Furiously paddling toward what I hoped were the right answers and a sense that I performed well.

“How do you think that went?” he asked me as we buckled into the back seat of the taxi.

“I think it was ok,” I said.

“And what’s your evidence for that?” he asked flatly.

That question stung because it went to the heart of the matter: I hadn’t been very present in the interview, so I had no real evaluation of what happened. It had been a performance. Not advocacy. Not a message. Just a messy, tortured performance in search of validation.

I mumbled some noncommital words.

Silence from Jon.

That man can make a dojo or an ashram out of a damn D.C. taxi.

The silence persisted.

Defensive tears stuck in my throat.

We bumped along, the wordlessness becoming increasingly painful. Why wouldn’t he just tell me I was a good girl, give me my “A”? Why wouldn’t he just say something sweet to me?

“I don’t know what you expect of me,” I said, trying not to cry. “I’m just Ms. Peeples from room 200, Palo Duro High School.”

“And why do you think you need to be anyone else?” he asked.

Exactly.

There are so many things I needed to hear in that question. Reflecting on it now, nearly a year later, I see how Jon gave me something much more important than advice. I see that he is a masterful teacher.

Those two questions: What is your evidence? Why do you think you need to be anyone else? penetrate my self-doubt, deflating all my puffery and ridiculousness, centering me back on what’s real.

That’s what the best teachers do. They write truth on your heart that circumstance can’t erase. Through his questions, Jon has stayed present with me, has been my mentor, and my model of calm, centered leadership. Even though he is retiring, his questions are not. His influence is not.

Cormac McCarthy created a beautiful image buried inside the ugly story of No Country For Old Men that reminds me of Jon: light. It appears in a dream that Ed Tom, one of the main characters, has about his father. McCarthy has Ed Tom say:

“…when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream, I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead.”

And that’s what I believe Jon’s legacy is. He carried the fire and he’s given it to each of us in the program. Wherever we go, that fire is with us. His legacy is with us. Thank you, Jon, for carrying the fire and for teaching us how to hold it for ourselves, and how to pass it on to those who come after us.

All my love to you, always.