Just show up with the best of what you have and what you know and offer it to them. Hold it out in your two hands, like a precious stone from the heart-vault of human experience and tell them that it is the best. It might be a story about Caesar or a poem about a wheelbarrow or a geometric proof or a neatly conjugated verb. It might be a cow’s eyeball or a song or something out of the epistles to the Corinthians. Some days, when you offer it, they will want it, and some days they will not, and some days they will take it from your hand and stuff it into their pocket without looking to wander on to the next thing, the next class, the next excitement. 

But you must continue to offer it; this is the heart of the job. Some days you will offer it and their eyebrows will shoot up and they will start asking strange questions from Timbuktu about it, and you will realize that they misunderstand what literary irony or an imaginary number even is, and so then you will slow down to explain its workings, which, coincidentally, is usually the same as explaining why you love it, why it’s the best of what you have.

So if you’re meant to teach for much time at all, you cannot possibly mind this perpetual act of offering. Because you know that you do not lose the things you offer. The things which you offer are all of the type which can be endlessly shared, so to offer them to the other souls in the room, the young ones with the sharp eyes who are in the midst of becoming, is really an act of expansion. The moment you begin to explain these things, these best-of-what-you-have, to pay close public attention them, to be curious about the way they are ordered, to point out the odd beauties and unwavering truths coursing through their veins, you are also offering your learners a steady stream of attention and curiosity and order and beauty and truth, all there for the taking. And while offering these things to others, you are also—by default—offering them to yourself. You, too, grow every time you bring these best-of-human-knowledge-and-experience odds and ends out of their cupboard into the light of day. The truths get true-r with every repetition, and every time—if you stop and notice—you know that.

As for the education of the young minds: some students, of course, will walk out of a classroom with many specific gifts from your lessons—how to give a speech, how to cite a source, how to avoid another Holocaust, how to build a roller coaster, how to parse a poem. That’s some students, you say, but what about the rest of them? (We know who those rest of them are.) Well, I say, if you offer every class you teach something you love, and if you offer these things over and over like gifts that glow, with sincerity and awe, then even the most unwilling, lethargic, obstreperous child will be unable to shake off the distinct impression that there are things worth knowing and there are things worth loving, that attention to God, his creatures, and the world which stumbles and prospers around them is a valuable pursuit.