Toad in the Hole

I put something in the reply string over at a Pharyngula post, and I’ll put it here too. I think I’ll want to talk about this subject more soon.

I’m trying to sift out the responses to the Ktroll who’s here humping PZ’s leg again and get to more interesting stuff, and Jack in #203 had one that struck me:

But in my short experience teaching (high school math), and longer experience married to an elementary school teacher, I found that the passion among elementary school teachers was for the kids. Many, many of them subscribe to “I am not in this profession to teach math or science or any other specific subject. I teach children.”

It’s unusual to have those passions--and talents--intersect in the same person, I guess, and there are plenty of malign or just crushingly-inert filters out there to further reduce the pool. Grade-school teachers, high-school teachers: they have to teach looking over their shoulders in a lot of schools, and that is exhausting. Class size, facilities, resources, surrounding microcultures, crazy school boards, insulting salaries, just plain social lunacies combine in various ways to wear teachers out. Having to worry about losing one’s job over assorted kinds of nonsense--how can they keep from being completely paralyzed, let alone be inspiring?

I’ve been lucky to have had some really talented teachers in my life, and IME they’ve combined teaching talent, a habit of actually looking at the people they teach (seriously, that bit of attentive, personal communication is a sort of exchange of trust that opens the learning mind), the freedom to teach as they wanted, and a passion for the subject. They don’t even have to be experts in the subject; they just have to know something I don’t and be excited about it.

“Teach children” isn’t quite a complete transitive-verb sentence. If you diagram it (hah) with the real world in mind you find an elided preposition, “to,” before “children.” So you still need an object, something to teach them. Something you yourself take visible pleasure in knowing.

I got a chance to co-teach a class in environmental journalism some years back, and found I had a couple of basic things to tell the youngsters there.
One: take science courses. Doesn’t much matter which; any subject there will give you a clue on how to research, and more important a sense of what’s likely and what isn’t, so you won’t be falling for the cranks.

Two, as I’d been telling aspiring writers for years before I made money at it myself: Yes, get your writing chops and keep practicing. But look around the great big world and find something you love more than you love writing or words. That’s what you write about.

Seems to me there’s something like that to apply to teaching. The example of joy and passion, that’s a great big deal. It doesn’t matter if your favorite thing isn’t something any particular student will glom onto; different things reach different people and seeing that it’s a pleasure to get into your subject is just as important as getting them past some standardized test. (More so, of course, but those damned tests, ugh, another bad filter.)

I’m creeping up on 60 and have lately met rather a lot of hot seniors. One of the first things you learn in the field when birding is to attach yourself like a limpet to the various heads of white hair you encounter; same applies to gardening, a passion Joe and I came to via birding and what we write about for most of our income now. What I find common to the most knowledgeable people, the people who find out new things for all of us, is passion.

Intelligence, IME, is not so much capability as it is appetite.

Communicating that appetite, now isn’t that an interesting problem we have to play with?