“It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.” Teach Different with Maya Angelou – Forgiveness
When is forgiving somebody the right thing to do?
True forgiveness can pave paths to healing and liberate us from hate. But what about the need for justice and accountability of unjust actions? Steve and Dan Fouts, founders of Teach Different and seasoned educators with over 50 years of experience, use the Teach Different Method to explore the delicate balance between forgiving and demanding accountability, shedding some light on its relevance in both current domestic and international events. Join them in this critical discussion that examines the real challenges of balancing love and hate.
Teach Different serves educational institutions, families, corporate entities, and mental health communities. If you think the TD method could be effective in your setting, we’d love to hear from you! support@teachdifferent.com
Image source: Flickr | York College ISLGP
Today’s Guest(s)
Dr. Steve Fouts
I think the only thing that has meaning in life is how you treat other people. It’s your passport to immortality – because whatever you give out will be passed on. I’ve taught most of my career on the west side of Chicago and believe that America’s next great generation of leaders will come from its urban communities.
I believe that America’s polarized state is temporary – and prophesied in Plato’s Republic — and that philosophical and charismatic leaders will emerge to bring about justice in our society.
I see social emotional learning skills and critical thinking as the most important gifts that we can pass on to students. I value deep, meaningful conversations that give everyone a chance to listen, speak and understand. I want to work with teachers, school leaders, business leaders and philanthropists to promote life-changing conversations and pave the way for the next generation of leaders.
Dan Fouts
I’ve taught high school social studies since 1993 in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I did my undergraduate work in philosophy and political science at Bradley University, and completed a graduate degree in education and social policy from Northwestern University.
Outside of the classroom, I’ve presented extensively at the state and national level on questioning and conversation techniques. I serve on the academic advisory board for PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) and have worked with the American Philosophical Association to bring philosophy into K-12 classrooms in the United States.
I believe the most difficult and important job of a teacher is to create environments where students listen to each other and share their unique perspectives on the world, without fear. Conversations achieve these ends in the most beautiful way. The byproducts of conversations are compassion, understanding and a collective sense of belonging. This is the soil that makes academic learning possible.
But it’s more than that.
With the mental health needs of teachers and students taking center stage, conversations now have added therapeutic value– they nurture mindfulness, disrupt negative thinking patterns and remind us all that we are not alone. We need conversations now more than ever.
Transcript
Dan Fouts 00:00
Hello, everybody, welcome to the teach different podcast we have Steve and Dan Fouts here, breaking down a quote. And we’re going to apply the teach different method to a quote and our author is going to be Maya Angelou for this one, and it’s going to be a quote on forgiveness, which is really, really powerful. Really quickly. For those of you who don’t know, the teach different method, Steve and I are going to work through this quote, we’re going to think about a claim and a counterclaim to the quote, have some good disagreements over it, and learn some good critical thinking skills. And then we’re going to try to have questions come up and surface as a result of the of the tension between the claim and the counterclaim. And then hopefully, leave everybody with things to think about, that you can apply to your own classroom. And we also like to, you know, connect everything we do to what’s going on in current events as well. So that’s a little intro, we’re ready to go. Maya Angelou, civil rights activists, amazing poet, she’s got some wonderful quotes that we have actually already have in our library. So she’s a frequent flyer with us here at Teach Different, here’s the quote,
Dan Fouts 01:18
It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody. Alright, Steve, you want to start off here? What is the claim?
Steve Fouts 01:38 Claim
I think I definitely got the claim. It’s that we should forgive. And its benefit to us is personal. I think that’s the insight here. Forgive because it helps you as the Forgiver. You’re not doing this for someone else, per se. You’re doing it for yourself. And it’s a gift that you give now, she doesn’t get into what that gift is. But it’s definitely for you. She’s trying to convince you to forgive.
Dan Fouts 02:15
Yeah, that’s interesting. I had a similar angle on this, that a lot of times people think about forgiveness, and the focus is on the other person, that you’re helping the other person heal, to feel better about the mistake that they made. But she’s thinking about this as a gift to yourself. So that makes me… Well, here’s a question that already surfaces here. What is it about forgiveness that is a gift to oneself? What does someone get out of forgiving someone?
Steve Fouts 02:48
And what are you doing when you forgive? There’s usually been some type of injustice done to you. And you’re allowing grace, you’re being patient, you’re withholding your own anger, you are at peace with yourself.
Steve Fouts 03:14
You’re at peace with something that happened that needed to be forgiven. So there’s a negativity in this that you’re overcoming. Right. And you have to overcome it.
Dan Fouts 03:30
Right, there’s something negative that you should get beyond and then the gift or the treasure that you get is when you get beyond something that would otherwise do you in. If you just think of personal experiences of being hurt by somebody, it’s so hard to not be angry when you feel like there’s an injustice that’s been done to you. And so she’s saying, take a step back, be patient, and maybe be a role model for peace and serenity in the world. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive.
Steve Fouts 04:13
But it’s a gift you can give yourself. There’s something about overcoming that anger and getting to that own kind of inner peace of releasing this stuff. Even if bad things are happening to you. Don’t focus your energies on hating someone else. You gotta let it go in a way because it preserves your peace. Okay, but do the counterclaim. This is difficult, forgiveness is difficult. And you can even argue that when you forgive other people for the things they do to you, it has negative consequences sometimes. So I’m thinking of a counterclaim. Go ahead. What are you thinking?
Dan Fouts 05:01 Counterclaim
Well, I’m looking at the last part of the quote, forgive everyone
Steve Fouts 05:05
Everyone.
Dan Fouts 05:07
And really forgive everyone? Everybody is what Maya Angelou is saying. I think depending on what happens to you, there are some people who might be beyond forgiveness, depending on what’s done. If it’s something so tragic and traumatic, there’s no space in your soul to forgive some people.
Steve Fouts 05:34
And it also rewards. In a way, you could argue that forgiving someone for doing something so bad, it rewards them for that behavior, in a way.
Dan Fouts 05:51
What do you mean by reward?
Steve Fouts 05:52
They don’t have repercussions. They did something, and now they’re getting someone else to say, You know what, I’m gonna let that go. I’m going to forgive you for that. I’m not going to come back after you. That’s a license, that’s a green light for some people to take advantage of that and say, You know what, now I can really do anything and they might forgive me. I’m saying that forgiveness is perceived as a weakness in some people.
Dan Fouts 06:26
And some people will read it as a weakness and an open door to continue abuse, or bad things to happen. It’s almost like a permission to continue on. And that’s unfortunate. But that is a message if you forgive everybody, depending on what it is.
Steve Fouts 06:49
So take the conflicts that we’re experiencing in the world right now, we got Israeli Hamas conflict, we have the Ukrainian conflict, we have lots of Tribal Wars, going on different parts of the world, where there’s genocide, there’s bad things happening to people, there’s innocent people, you know, being murdered.
Dan Fouts 07:14
And there’s domestic, even inside the United States, think about the domestic struggles we’re having between political parties and supporters of different candidates now as the 2024 election is coming up. There’s a lot of hurt that’s been done, perceived hurt from both sides. And so this applies there too.
Steve Fouts 07:43
Exactly and forgive, like, Do you forgive people? How does that help? You know, think of someone who participated in the January 6th Event? There’s a lot of anger toward those people from certain people in society. But could they forgive them for that? What would that take? For them to actually say, you know what, what you did I don’t agree with, it was wrong, it hurt us, etc. But I forgive. What does that look like? I understand what your anger was. I know you were frustrated. I didn’t do it myself. But maybe I would have done the same thing in your situation. You know, I don’t know what it takes to justify forgiveness. But it’s, it’s tough to ask these questions, but this is what you have to ask, when possible.
Dan Fouts 08:47
And that speaks to how using this in a setting with people familiar with some of these events, you could really help people process the thinking processes of people in these situations where wrong has been done or perceived wrong has been done, and actions are taken or being taken. And what if forgiveness was an intentional response? How would things play out differently, applying what Maya Angelou is saying, would it be a gift to yourself? And so yeah, I like that connection.
Steve Fouts 09:32
But let’s take it up a notch. You know, because I use January 6. That’s a charged disagreement. In a lot of ways some people don’t even see it as something that was necessarily 100% bad and evil. You know, it was more of a political, you know, protest. If you look at what Hamas did on October 7, That’s something that is agreed upon to be something– I don’t know what evil looks like, but it’s as close as you can get to something really, really bad that everybody would agree is. Is forgiveness possible in that situation?
Dan Fouts 10:26
Yeah, they’re just tough questions. You can also think about this issue of forgiveness from the Palestinian side. That the injuries that have occurred towards Palestinians. And Palestinians are faced with the very same question. When do you forgive? And when is an injustice perceived or otherwise, so strong that you just can’t forgive? You have to respond. So both sides of this conflict are grappling with the same philosophical issue.
Steve Fouts 11:02 Essential Question
But of course Maya Angelou would say that it’s a gift that you can give yourself. There’s something that you’re benefited by, by forgiving whether you’re Israeli, whether you’re Hamas, there’s some gift that you’re given. And that’s where I wish she were here. I want to ask her more about that gift. This is feeling like my essential question here. What is that gift? Why does it benefit us to look past all this pain and the struggle and this hatred? Why does that benefit us? It sounds counterproductive.
Dan Fouts 11:43
And I would ask her in the context of some of these conflicts that we’re mentioning here. Is there a gift? In some, in some cases, there might not be a gift?
Steve Fouts 11:58
That’s the counterclaim. But I want her to rescue that. You know, because, personally, I feel that some grace and some forgiveness has to occur at some point. This will never end. And I don’t know what that looks like. And I’m not giving advice to anyone.
Dan Fouts 12:22
And maybe if we’re applying Maya Angelou’s quote to these world events, we might be realizing that it’s harder to apply to these world events, when bad things happen, and you’re in a position of having or choosing whether or not to forgive. So maybe Maya Angelou quote here, it’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself to forgive, forgive everybody – maybe this is more applicable on a personal level with individuals who have wronged you. Maybe it can be applied better that way. Which is an interesting nuance if this is brought up in class or whatever setting you’re using it with. That’s a way to parse this out a little.
Steve Fouts 13:09
Yeah, it’s a good question as to whether or not it’s easier to forgive someone that you know, or easier to forgive someone that you don’t know, when you’re trying to understand where the person is coming from. I could see different arguments made there, right. I love using the example of if you get your wallet stolen at Union Station, or if you get your wallet still stolen at the family reunion, by someone you know. Would it be easier to forgive the person at the family reunion if you found out who stole that? Or would it be easier to forgive the homeless person who took your wallet at Union Station? So I don’t know the answer to what makes it harder or easier. You know, Maya Angelou is saying that you need to do it. Because there’s a benefit to you, whether it’s as a person or perhaps as a nation, or thinking of yourself as a nation, there’s a benefit to understanding or forgiving people that do you wrong that want to do you wrong. That’s tough. Right?
Dan Fouts 14:19
And how do you overcome those feelings of anger, especially when you feel like injustice has been done? I see the counterclaim here very clearly that you can’t always forgive people and nations. But that if you can somehow do it in the right setting, it can have benefits. So maybe what we’re saying is there’s two things that can be true at the same time. Yes, forgiveness can confer amazing benefits to you. But too much forgiveness can be a negative and can end up hurting you in different ways. And so an essential question that is just rolling around in my brain is when should we forgive other people? When is forgiving the right thing to do?
Steve Fouts 15:13
And I’ll throw in this one. What is the gift that you get in different situations by doing it?
Dan Fouts 15:23
So yeah, okay, well, that’s that. I really enjoyed this, this is a really great theme of forgiveness that really applies to all students. And again, what we’re modeling here, which Steve and I are modeling are how you can use these conversations in the context of students’ lives and the current events that, you know, we face every day, there’s so many different applications. And the more we can encourage and nudge the kids to think deeply about these core issues, and then apply them to their world, the better people they’re going to become, the more thoughtful, the more empathetic, the more authentic, they’re going to be. And that’s what we do here at Teach Different, to have these conversations that are meant to help us become more authentic human beings who understand each other better.
Steve Fouts 16:22
And the other thing that it did, is that it allowed us to talk about highly charged situations, but not in an antagonistic way. It’s in a questioning way, it’s in a way to try to understand things more and just really look at them and consider them, you don’t have to take sides, you can get an appreciation for the challenges that each side has, on what it is that they should do, what it is that they’re being asked to do.
Dan Fouts 16:56
Yes. And when kids can think deeply and philosophically and do it in a way where you can honor different perspectives. We have to believe in them to be able to do that and, and I think it’s our goal to to model that. Because if we don’t do it as educators and adults, it’s harder for younger people to learn the skills. So thanks everybody so much for joining in on the podcast, and hope you enjoy this little episode on Maya Angelou. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself to forgive. Forgive everybody. Take care everybody.
