Geneen Roth

For some reason, we are truly convinced that if we criticize ourselves, the criticism will lead to change. If we are harsh, we believe we will end up being kind. If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.
- Geneen Roth

This is true with teaching, too - we think criticism is the same as teaching, that shaming is an excellent and effective motivator. You can't force an end using an unsuitable means. Only love leads to love.

Thomas Merton

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

-Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

Ass in Chair

Here's the correct way to advise somebody: Love them. Respect them. Know them. Read their stuff, understand where they're coming from. If they're your students, talk to them in class and during your office hours. Ask them how it feels when they can't finish something. Ask them how it feels when they can. Help them get at their obsessions. It's possible that they aren't really trying very hard, and in an undergraduate workshop, this is sometimes the case. Writing really isn't for everybody, and we have a reputation for giving out easy A's. But usually they are trying, sometimes far harder than you have ever had to try to do anything. Sometimes they are crying at their desks at night. Sometimes they would rather die than have to finish their poem or short story. If you are not like that, it isn't because you are better. It's because you are different. Your own experience isn't worthless, but if you think something that works for you might work for a student or friend, put it in terms that acknowledge that you are different. “Here's something that works for me, why don't you try it.” What would you do if you were like them? Suggest that. Offer your student or friend some exercises that might allow them to find the thread themselves. You're not going to find it for them, especially not by implying that they don't work hard enough.

The Ass-In-the-Chair Canard, from J Robert Lennon's blog

Read the whole thing - it's good! He has a lot of cool things to say about teaching.

David Mamet

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.
― David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

Watching Death of a Salesman

The worksheet’s main purpose was to verify that the kids actually read it, to show that they could identify the correct make and model of the car that made its appearance in Act II. I’m sure a worksheet might capture valuable individual notes, ephemeral details, and vocabulary.

No worksheet could capture whether that play conveyed actual human meaning to these young people. “I told you that I hate that class,” my daughter told me. Who can blame her? I’ll bet similar mediocre experiences are being replicated across thousands of classrooms across America.

We’re living through tough economic times here in the southland of Chicago. Foreclosures and layoffs have brought financial disappointment, thwarted upward mobility, and everyday struggles for economic dignity that bear unmistakable resemblances to Willy Loman’s plight. Death of a Salesman might have provided an opportunity to communicate through literature what all too many of the families represented in that classroom are now going through.

This was an opportunity squandered. Attention should have been paid.

-Harold Pollock, The Incidental Economist

This is a heartfelt essay posted by Harold Pollock on his blog, The Incidental Economist. Read it, not to agree or disagree, but just to contemplate. The comments following are pretty thoughtful, too.

Read here.

The Socratic Method

It should be one of the functions of a teacher to open vistas before his pupils, showing them the possibility of activities that will be as delightful as they are useful.
-Bertrand Russell

I love using the Socratic method when I teach. So much happens simultaneously, with no more investment than a certain respect and trust between teacher and student. It's the ultimate improvisation - you have a goal in mind, an idea or concept, say, and you start with a question. If you use the method correctly, you'll have no idea what will happen next. This makes the method exhilarating, but also nerve-wracking, for both the teacher and student. The interaction is risky, because it doesn't always work out the way you or the student hopes. Maybe that's why it can build such a nice collegiate atmosphere between you and your students - you're all going through the experience together.

When it does work, you learn a lot about how your students are thinking, and they get a better grasp on what you want them to understand. I often couple the interaction with some sort of worksheet that we all work on together. I move from small group to small group, having quick, concise Socratic moments centered on particular questions or exercises. If I see that everyone is struggling with a particular point, I'll pull the class together and we'll work on that as a class. And I'll make a mental note to review what I did or didn't do that resulted in the confusion.

I have been wondering lately how one would teach a teacher how to use the technique. I've never tried to analyze how I do it, though I imagine that I could. I do prepare by playing out in my mind how students might respond to certain questions. For now I will close this post by quoting from the article where I found my opening quotation. I found this article recently at the University of Chicago Law School website, based on an essay by Elizabeth Garrett, a former professor there.

We are teaching reasoning skills, and the process of discovering a right answer is often more important than the answer itself.  Mistakes - or perhaps, more accurately, tentative steps toward a solution that lead us down unavailing but illuminating paths - are part of learning.

. . . students can sometimes be frustrated by the uncertainty . . . when the Socratic Method is the dominant teaching style, because they are confronting a new vocabulary, unfamiliar logical analysis, and the unusual form of narrative found in [any new discipline] . . .  But to provide certainty where there is none or to give a neat framework where the [discipline] is messy is to teach dishonestly.

Read the whole article here.

Krishnamurti

Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well.  That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

My Math Teacher is Psycho!

I was helping a student with her math homework. I asked her how her teacher had shown her to do a particular kind of algebra problem. She expressed some dissatisfaction with her teacher, and I asked her about it. She dramatically replied, "My teacher is psycho!"

Well. "What do you mean?" I asked. "She's very calm and nice and helpful when we're trying to do math, and then all of a sudden she just starts yelling and screaming." "What does she yell about?" I ventured. "Who knows? Something gets her going, a student says something, whatever, she just yells and screams. Then she tries to go back to being all lovey-dovey. But you know she'll start screaming again. It drives me crazy."

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Here was a student who was inclined to like and trust her teacher, but felt violated by the teacher's sudden and harsh attempt to "discipline" the class. I'm sure the teacher had no idea how much her behavior unnerved this student. It was also striking that the student had no idea what the teacher was responding to - "something, whatever" - so the teacher's outburst seemed arbitrary and unpredictable. The student, understandably, was unable to place her trust in the teacher, and thus her ability to learn was compromised.

I am always struck by how unaware of themselves teachers seem to be. They don't understand what they look like, what they sound like, what messages they telegraph. They can leave behind a trail of confused, hurt, scared, angry students. Teaching in a classroom is a particularly difficult kind of performance, precisely because it is NOT entertainment; there is meant to be a specific outcome, an outcome that these days needs to be measurable and demonstrable.

Here is what most puzzles me. I think you'll agree that "yelling and screaming" is a common experience for both teachers and parents. And it doesn't work. No, really, it doesn't work. As a way to vent your frustration, it does make you feel better. Your students might respond by temporarily avoiding the behavior that brought on the outburst. But even this avoidance doesn't guarantee that your students have learned anything except that you yell and scream. And that's what your students tell me after you are through yelling at them: my teacher hates me, or my teacher is psycho.

You wouldn't teach math by yelling or screaming. You might be frustrated that your students don't know what you wish they knew, but you don't take it out on them. Even if you like punishment as a technique, you know not to punish ignorance - your job is to correct ignorance. Why wouldn't you use the same techniques that you use to teach math to teach your students how you want them to behave?