Yesterday, I stood before Andy Thomas’s The Battle of Carthage with a group from Arkansas. Bayonets, smoke, and divided men filled the canvas, while the Jasper County Courthouse rose steady at the center—less a backdrop than a witness to July 5, 1861, when neighbor fought neighbor in the streets of Carthage. Thomas captured more than battle; he captured the chaos of divided loyalties, the way war collapses into the spaces of everyday life. Standing there, explaining the scene, I was not only describing history but pointing to the very courthouse, the very earth, where that history unfolded.
I walked them through the galleries—muskets, uniforms, letters—objects still alive with memory. My voice carried, my hands gestured, I watched their eyes take in the weight of it all. At the end of the tour, one visitor turned to me and said, “You’re a great docent.”
Those words linger. They cut past the surface and went straight into the part of me that has wrestled for years with a quiet ache: the sense that I am not really a teacher. For most of my career, my work has not looked like teaching in the traditional sense. I manage a program. Students work independently. I track credits, I tutor in fragments, I spend much of my time in crisis management. I do not lecture in front of a blackboard. I do not grade stacks of essays. I listen, I de-escalate, I try to hold fragile lives together long enough for education to take root. I have always felt this made me “less than.”
When I finished my doctorate, that feeling only grew sharper. An Ed.D., not a Ph.D.—a title that seemed to deepen rather than quiet the whispers of imposter syndrome. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described this decades ago: the “internal experience of intellectual phoniness” that persists despite achievement. Yesterday, with the ink of my dissertation still barely dry, I felt that description pressing on me as I guided those visitors through the museum. Even now, the doctorate hangs on my wall, but inside the doubt still murmurs: you don’t teach like others, you don’t belong among them.
And yet yesterday, standing in front of Thomas’s painting, I was teaching. The stranger who named me “a great docent” recognized what I so often refuse to recognize in myself. The Latin root of docent—docere—means to teach. To guide. Not to profess from a platform, but to show the way. That is what I do, in the museum and in my program: I guide. I witness. I stand with others in their moments of confusion and try to make sense of what they are seeing or living.
Perhaps the painting itself is a mirror. The courthouse in the center stands steady while the battle rages around it, a civic witness to the storm. That is often my role: I cannot stop the chaos, but I can remain present within it, offering stability and direction. Simone Weil once wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Yesterday I remembered that what I give—to my students, to museum visitors, to anyone who crosses my path—is my attention. And that, too, is teaching.