I am inspired to agreement with Hunter here, and would like to put some formalized structure to what he is describing. What he is describing is not a phenomenon restricted to the bounds of Literature, but a general requirement of any good educator and mentor. Through his demand that students catch up to him ahead where he’s stopped, it forces them to grow. Such growth is not type that is easily quantifiable on assessments and skill tests, but the type that is deep, holistic, and intrinsic. Teacher who “meet students where they are,” do a disservice to their students in exchange for higher pass rates and lower educational frustration. Learning occurs when students are challenged, just the right amount, into ascending their previous selves into something that only their teacher knew was possible. This is the incumbent expectation that all educators and mentors should hold themselves to.
Read the article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/youth-reading-books-professors/685825
Human have a tendency to see stability, not just in their external lives, but their inner ones as well. There are exceptions of course, but people generally do not seek personal growth unless they are forced to, an effect only become more encompassing as one ages. The young are more open and responsive to the challenges of self-development, but anyone drive themselves toward it if they so choose. In later years, growth is typically instigated by a significant life changes or trauma. Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) is the study of this phenomenon, where people undergo sudden and life-changing alternations to their personality, values, and pursuits after job loss, confrontations with death or ill-ness, divorce, etc… The result is a somewhat frantic rush to explore and experiment with new ways of being and thinking that achieve both growth and destabilization. There is not guide or mentor to help people through these times, and there’s no guarantee of success.
A classroom is a completely different environment, where lower stress PTG can and does occur. Indeed, this type of education has a term, Transformative Learning. Teachers cause routine “disorienting dilemmas” that destabilize the student’s assumptive worldview and then guide toward greater self-discovery and understanding. Hunter achieves this through is introduction of the flash essays, which evidently cause a great deal of disorientation as the students had to write into the darkness. His students gain because he pressured them with the appropriate amount of stress that only an experienced mentor and educator could, while guiding them to the place he wanted them to find. Such transformations are not possible when teachers meet students where they are, and the entire concept of intentional causing dilemmas is abhorrent to such an educational philosophy, which the student suffer from in the form on early stagnation of the self, never become more.
Hunter’s Whitman analogy could be expanded to say that a transformative educator, to which Hunter certainly is, doesn’t simply wait for them to catch up. Instead, they shut down all the cozy rest stops along the way, but leaves them the right tools at the right place for the next leg of the journey to catch up. Students as a result, learn that there’s more worth seeing and understanding further down the road, and through that experience may desire to travel the road further long after the class has ended. The converse of meeting students where they are at, means the teachers brings a couple of postcards back from the road ahead for them to look at and them helps them fortify their current rest stops so they never have to leave. Those students never seen what’s further ahead, and worse are taught that is not worth the hassle of going to find out.
As a former teacher, I saw this reluctance to travel the path every day. The course didn’t matter, be it physics, conflict resolution, psychology, peace studies, or moral philosophy. Some students consistently relished the opportunity to see what was ahead, while others were terrified to step outside the door, and those were the student tended to have greatest transformations as they persevered through the disorienting dilemmas I destabilized them with. Sadly, there were a subset of those terrified students that had previous teachers who either built up their rest stop into a palace, or left them floundering on the road with no guide one too many times. They would rather choose to fail from day one than stepping out, and it was the failure of those early educators that created there, now justifiable, fear. Therefore, it is truly incumbent on every teacher, mentor, educator, and professor to not just challenge students transform, but knowing guide them toward the path of growth.