On Teachers

I started life as an elementary school teacher, then moved into higher education where I taught prospective elementary school teachers (and others). My sense of teaching between then, when I started, and now, when my career essentially is behind me, has been turned on its head. I now know that you can't teach anybody anything; all you can do is make it possible for them to learn.

Or as Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) would say: "You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room."

Learning is a quality of being born. All living beings seek to learn; they are born with innate curiosity about the world around them. The main role of human parents is to protect their young children while this learning is taking place, because learning will take place. As all good teachers and parents do, you provide the type of environment ripe for exploration, filled with age-appropriate books and toys, art and building materials, and set them forth -- with healthy and regular doses of positive reinforcement.

You provide conversation and, sometimes, gentle direction. Language should fill the learning space. Children need us to talk to them, and they need to talk to us. This is how they test their assumptions and acquire a rich vocabulary. Nothing is more important in the learning environment than words and hands-on activity. Gaining experience, rehearsing that experience, then sharing that experience with others is at the heart of all learning, even basics like reading, writing, and math.

The teacher who stands in front of a room and talks, without allowing students to also talk, distributes the same worksheet to everyone, and then gives a clearly right-/clearly wrong-answer test has missed the point of teaching. This is something the teacher is doing for her or his own convenience, perhaps out of a need to keep each day routine and therefore more known and less stressful, but it has nothing to do with student-centeredness or student learning. Mentors are good; lecturers are not.

Probably the only things I've ever truly learned -- wholly absorbed -- in my life are those things I've heard my own self say. In this regard, whether their students do or not, teachers should learn a great deal by the act of teaching. Now it's time to hook our students with that same truth and provide them with opportunities to explore its fullness.

By the way, I have not finished with my own learning so I have no clue when wisdom happens, or if it ever does. The world is filled to the rafters with things I do not know and want to learn, and those rafters are as high as the sky. It's a bit hard for me to climb these days, but I can stretch. Heaven help me if and when I can no longer stretch.