I read a statement the other day by a young man who is a writer about technology and a PhD student at Harvard. He has just begun his first teaching experience and he was unpleasantly surprised at how difficult it was to teach. He asked a professor friend how to teach and was told that it was quite easy and that just relying on previous experience as a student would be a sufficient guide.
Teaching is a rich subject, full of twists and turns. Most people find themselves at various times and places in the role of teacher. There are always exceptions but usually teaching involves three elements: the teacher, the student and the subject matter, the material or skill to be learned or the experience to be had. All three points of that triangle can involve many variables and odd conditions. The usual notion of a person who knows is a professor, a word associated with colleges and universities. In this country, a professor can be expected to have a PhD, a graduate school degree involving three or five or more years of study. Some specialties involve other degrees, such as an Master of Fine Arts or Master of Library Science.
It often comes as a surprise to education majors planning to be teachers in the public schools that their professors may have little or no training in being a teacher. Traditionally, in old universities, maybe dating from roughly the year 1000 or earlier, the idea was that if a person knew the material to be taught and that person was dealing with a well-equipped student, one with an appropriate background and desire to learn, teaching was not something to worry about. Many people in our culture can grasp the old idea by thinking of the relation between a master and an apprentice. The master (a male) might be gruff and uncommunicative, he might do a poor job of explaining and of demonstrating but eventually the apprentice would learn. It would be assumed that any psychological damage to the apprentice, or the master for that matter, would be minimal and negligible. This whole paragraph is based on an assumption of a male teacher and a male apprentice, a picture that supposedly minimizes extra-curricular relations of a sexual or personal nature between them.
Any adult human is likely to realize from the start that such an assumption cannot be made when we change the picture to involve young children of both sexes, an age when children are easily confused or discouraged or frightened. The traditional approach then is to rely on maternal feelings, intuitions and tools. A female voice and a female gentleness, coupled with a sensitivity to the nature and personality of a young child go a long way, in most cases, to guide kids into learning and augmented growth over what they experience merely playing by themselves near their mother, or being put to work in fields and industry.
Surprisingly, along with these approaches, there developed a basic disdain for ability in explanation or organization of the curriculum. That disdain historically carried over to looking down on anyone who tried to analyze teaching ability or classroom effectiveness. Only recently, as population growth stalls, have more traditional colleges and universities begun to get serious about finding and building good teachers.
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