Listen.
That is how the day begins. Voices rise above the shuffle of chairs and the rustle of test packets. “Listen to the directions.” “Listen for the time.” It is the rule before the ritual. It is the word that stills a room of restless motion.
The building hums with the sound of testing: pencils scratching, pages turning, sneakers squeaking faintly across linoleum floors. Students I haven’t seen in weeks sit beside others I’ve never met, their faces lowered toward the page, their expressions caught somewhere between concentration and fatigue. In these moments, my work feels less like teaching and more like witnessing.
Listen.
I look around the room. Every face has a story I do not know. There is the young mother stealing a glance at the clock, already thinking about her next shift. The quiet boy whose eyes never rise from the conputer screen. The student who laughs softly to herself, perhaps at a private thought. They have all come here to be measured, but what I see are lives in motion, converging briefly in these rooms before parting again.
Van Gogh once said, “There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” In his early portraits—the Head of a Young Man with a Pipe, the weary women in shawls, the farmers bent with work—he was learning not just to draw but to listen. Each face became a conversation, rendered in charcoal and chalk. His lines are deliberate, tender, unflinching. He looked at people not to capture them but to understand them, to let their humanity speak through the texture of the page.
Listen.
The philosopher Martin Buber wrote that most of our relationships are I-It encounters: functional, efficient, necessary. But sometimes, if we are paying attention, an I-Thou moment breaks through: one being meeting another in their full presence. I think of that when I catch a student’s eyes and, for an instant, both of us pause. There is no instruction, no test, no system. There is only recognition. It’s fleeting, but real.
Simone Weil called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” To attend to another is to resist the rush of the day, to make room for their existence within our own. In this sense, teaching is less about content than about witness. We listen with our eyes, our patience, our willingness to be interrupted by the reality of someone else’s life.
Rainer Maria Rilke once said that love means “two solitudes that protect and touch and greet each other.” Maybe that is what these days are: a meeting of solitudes. I stand before rows of desks, each student a world unto themselves, and I try to greet those worlds without collapsing them into my own.
John Berger observed that “we never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” That is the hidden work of the classroom, and of art: every face becomes a mirror. What we see in others reveals the truth of what we carry within. When Van Gogh drew his peasants, he was also drawing himself—the longing, the compassion, the ache to belong to the same earth-stained humanity.
Listen.
The day ends. The last test is finished, the room empties, and the building exhales. I collect the pencils and stack the papers, each one marked by effort and silence. I think of Van Gogh, sketching by lamplight, surrounded by faces that asked for nothing but to be seen. The same request hums through these halls.
“Listen,” I had said this morning, meaning: follow the rules.
Now, as I stand in the quiet, it means something else entirely.
Listen—to the echo of footsteps, to the stillness that follows effort, to the faces that spoke without words.
Listen—because every act of seeing is also an act of hearing.
Listen—because somewhere in that practice, between attention and compassion, is the beginning of love.