How to Teach Well

Teaching is a very difficult thing to do well and it takes an enormous amount of energy and time and what we might call just generally psychic resources. I have recently learned to fly an airplane and I have a flight instructor and teaching a 60 year old guy to fly an airplane is a pretty challenging assignment and we talk a lot, he and I about the nature of teaching and now he is teaching me a technique and a set of rules and practices and so on, and I try to teach people habits of mind and methods of inquiry and so on, so it is quite different results that we are aiming at, but he and I were up in the airplane, we have a lot of occasion to discuss what works and what is effective teaching, how do you really make someone internalize an understanding of something that is new and exotic to the human. Maybe someday we ourselves do not understand perfectly, although we have a better understanding than the student, maybe not perfect to understand. How do you guide someone into entering a domain of knowledge or a field of expertise in which you are ahead of them, but maybe not absolutely terrific at it. Those are big challenges and I am still learning how to do it, I think. So I once heard a lecture from a British Professor whose name is escaping me at the moment and he said, he began every—he was a Literature professor and he began every new course that he taught by announcing to the students, “I know a way a lot about English Literature and you do not, and my objective is to change that equation in your favor.” And that is a pretty good rough and ready definition of what my idea of teaching is about.

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