My aunt has won the Extreme Home Makeover deal, and today she and her family were welcomed home by the Extreme Home Makeover team as well as scores of other people, including myself. It was pretty cool, and I can say I was there.
At my aunt's house, among the hundreds of people, I saw my old science teacher. It was simply wonderful to meet the man again, and to have a talk with him was even more enjoyable. Not to criticize or put anyone down, but he is by far the single greatest science teacher I've ever had the honor of knowing. The reason I say science teacher and not just teacher in general is that I have had three of the best teachers around, one of them taught me German and the other math, the third I just named. I always value this man's opinion, and it was exciting to have his ear for as long as I had for I had so many questions. In our discussions we talked about such things as cars, extra-terrestrial life, education, (obviously or it wouldn't be related to this blog) the universe, you know, all the usual stuff. Looking past the other things, whilst conversing on education I found something he said particularly interesting. That is he said, "The greatest obstacle teachers have is dealing with students". I thought about this, and I was a bit surprised to find that he was right. I would've thought that teachers have more problems thrown at them by administration, or the government, or parents...anything but students. I thought of students as the whole reason one becomes a teacher, and I think, or hope, that's true. However students do create more problems for teachers than any other entity or person. Think about it. It's students who need an education, and teachers are tasked with providing it. How does one go about it? Well, usually a student either can't or doesn't tell a teacher how to teach them something, they can only tell the teacher if something is working or if something isn't. If a teacher tries to do something and it works well, great. If it doesn't work so great, what happens? The teacher is caught in a pickle and lots of them aren't good at eating their way out. There aren't clear-cut instructions on these types of things. It's like sexing a chicken. You are either good at it or you're not. Teachers have to decide what to talk about, how to talk about it, how in depth to go, whether there is homework, textbooks, all that jazz. When you throw in all those choices in a mixed-ability classroom the room for error is massive and essentially unavoidable. Along with different abilities come from different learning styles, which throws in another factor that expands the possible ways in which teachers can do things. The possibilities are literally infinite. Ask a good teacher to do something different every day and they'd never run out of things to try. The best teachers I have had, my favorite three, have several things in common:
1) they rarely or never use a textbook
2) they TALK--explain things like a normal person, not a scholar, not like they're talking to a third grader; AND they care about what they're teaching, which is contagious
3) they teach to those who are willing and able, very little spoon-feeding and slowing down for those who can't or won't keep up
I've already said several things that parallel all of the above, so get used it.
No comments:
Post a Comment