I look forward to each of your blogs, summarizing in your own unique voices the gist of our attempted compilation yesterday. We will all learn a lot from each others' ways of framing the matter. A couple more issues occur to me that did not come up in detail:
Teacher as personal inspiration/foil -- especially relevant in character development, a teacher who is sufficiently inspiring for her human qualities, or sufficiently repellent to inspire students to want to be better than that, may subtly teach merely by her presence. The latter underscores our observation that teacherly intent underdetermines the extent and content of learning.
Empathetic Imagination -- As we have observed, one of the reasons knowledge of a subject is not equivalent to the ability to teach it is the difficulty of remembering what it was like before you grasped the subject. Great teachers know their subjects, but also can empathetically imagine what it feels like for students who do not, so as to build bridges from there to here.
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4 comments:
We really are setting the bar quite high for our teachers, aren't we? We might as well re-name them "Guardians" and call it a day!
I understand the importance of every one of the virtues of a good teacher, but how are we to build a practical system that fosters such lofty goals?
I don't think we're expecting every teacher to instantiate every ideal teacherly characteristic at every moment, but it's hard to see how to start until we describe all facets of a fully accomplished teacher. Presumably any real-world teacher actualizes each of our principles to some degree.
Seeing as how some teachers teach what they would probably consider to be the opposite of what they intended to teach at times, whether it be because they did not instantiate some of these ideals we have discussed or other reasons, there is some weirdness. Weirdness in the fact that a good teacher can not exhibit a lot of qualities of a good teacher and still get a good deal across to the students. I've had teachers who substituted reason for handwaving before, and I'd say I learned a good bit about motives teachers have, and how to teach among other things.
Do you think that a teacher who is ‘sufficiently repellent’ encourages more individual determination from students? I am inclined to think this might be the case – but I cannot seem to reconcile the evident contradiction or hypocrisy in such a case. E.g., some nutritionists teach a meat-based diet, as the healthiest dietary choice. If I were in such a class, I might very well attempt to show otherwise. Also, that nutrition itself cannot be taught in a vacuum; we are concerned also with environmental, economical, and ethical considerations.
Some students might find a teacher “sufficiently inspiring for her human qualities” even in a case where the teacher gets it wrong; a danger exists when a teacher’s affable personality and delivery disarms students and disengages them from the material - some students might fall back into a comfort zone and accept unchallenged claims, focusing on learning the material as-is.
I might consider such a teacher ‘sufficiently repellent’; and that might help fuel the fire. Reminds me of Carl Cohen’s many illogical arguments and attacks directed at Tom Regan. Hypothetically scenario – I am a student in Cohen’s class, and I’m certain that I find him more than ‘sufficiently repellent’- but his ignorance (in my view) might help motivate me to do my best work.
We might find the ideal combination of attraction and repulsion when we study with a teacher we admire (both for her qualities as a person, and for her investigative rigor), and we address topics that might seem unreasonable. We are determined to discover why something might be wrong; in this way we grasp a more universal understanding of things; and use this ammunition to posit alternative views.
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