Let’s Keep Saying It! “WOW!” & “YUM!” | Remembering Michael Koran

Working in the field of education for the last nearly 30 years I’ve seen all types of teachers and teaching styles. There are text based teachers, there are experience based teachers, there are teachers who love what they do and those who don’t. There are teachers who need to teach in a way that seems like unloading a burden, inflicting a punishment, or as an act of penance and there are also teachers who give freely of their time beyond the boundaries of the allotted class schedule. I imagine that over his many years of teaching Michael’s style incorporated a mixture of most of that. Walt Whitman says that life is full of contradictions and that we each contain multitudes. I came into the trajectory of Michael’s teaching career at the end of it…the last five years of it….and so got to taste the finest of the wine and the most potent expression of the sharing of a life. I was witness and recipient of the most pointed arrow of a teaching message, pulled and released at the mind, body, and spirit of students.

Of course when teaching on James Joyce or Walt Whitman or a host of other topics, Michael would walk (or zoom) into the classroom with his understanding of the text up front and center. Scholarly, literal and literate.  People paid tuition to learn about a topic and text and Michael could teach the hell out of it, but Michael also knew that the true lesson of any text or anything was distillation and interpretation. There was the text and then there was the con-text. The text in-place and with (and within) us. As his students, we soon discovered that we are all (in Michael’s words) co-authors, co-creators and artists of the text/topic as a metaphorical mystical bridge that connects and carries THAT world over to THIS one… crossing time to the always here-now space of the heart. And we learned that the text is still unfinished and the end is still a mystery… even to the author. And we learned that the ending is still able to have a favorable outcome, no matter where in the story we stood at present.

Michael’s gift as a teacher and person was firmly rooted in lessons of how to interpret a text or a technique in a way that spoke to the life of his students. And what would said topic or text speak about? The unspeakable eternals of course. Death, love and the survival of love. And in learning about topics touching on the unspeakable, we would realize that we were learning WITH Michael. When the class was finished and the book completed and closed, we realized that Michael had taught us the true names of main characters of every story. No matter what the author named them, or the name of the author – the main characters are always named YOU and ME.

And he explained and shared the map of connecting paths between you and me and here and there. Fear and all of its outcomes of course are connectors… and love. Thinking about it, with Michael the assumption and the ending was always love. Love not as seen through rose-colored glasses however. Michael’s  experience and understanding of love was messy and fierce…a love both worth fighting for and surrendering to. My four minutes are up and yet there’s so much more to say…so let’s keep saying it.…in his name and as a way to remember his understanding and interpretation of fierce love. It was so fitting that Michael would spend much of his teaching career in the field of community education….a place where the intention is to learn not usually in order to get a promotion at work, but in order to become a better educated and community connected person. Not to come away with something to sell in order to get, but rather to come away as someone with something to share…. with something to give to someone else. Michael would encourage and invite you to teach for Lexington Community Education…so please feel invited by him through me. He would say that you don’t need to be expert on the text, just be seriously in love with it. I’d love to talk about any and all of your ideas regarding that. We have started the Michael Koran Legacy Series and CC KING will present the first of it here at Follen church next Saturday at 3:30. The topic is Beginner’s Mind & Embodied Play through InterPlay. You can find information in our catalogs by the door. Please come….and if tuition is a problem, come anyway. Michael would be so happy to have you here, and I hope to see you then. I end here and begin again with perpetual and heartfelt thanks to and for Michael Koran.