WADING THROUGH WISDOM
or, thoughts in response to a question
about my pedagogical approach.
My mother was an elementary-school teacher for
thirty years. My father was a high-school teacher for thirty years. All of
their good friends were either elementary-school or high-school teachers. I
grew up, quite literally, surrounded and influenced by people who devoted their
lives to teaching. I watched them go to work energized and come home exhausted
(but satisfied). I watched them read texts and write lesson plans and grade
great stacks of tests and quizzes and papers. And I watched them suffer, year
after year, principal after principal, new superintendent after new
superintendent, the yearly or monthly or weekly shifts in the winds of
educational theories. I watched them suffer in-service after in-service, where
they were schooled in the latest fads of pedagogical theory, which were almost
always taught by people with much less classroom experience and far less
classroom savvy than they had. I watched them jump through hoops and try new
fashions and prance and preen because experts or consultants or school boards
told them to. And I watched them always, inevitably return to what they
thought, to what they knew, to what they always did. Because it worked.
Because it came from common sense and uncommon experience. And because, in the
end, teaching is little about theory and a lot about practice.
I went through nineteen years of formal education, from kindergarten to high school, from college to grad school, from outside Philadelphia to inside Pittsburgh to outside Washington D.C., and I saw and felt and came to know first-hand the strategy and practice and execution of good teaching. Just as I saw it in my mother’s classroom. Just as I saw it in my father’s classroom. Just as I saw it in their friends’ classrooms. Just as I lived it at home. It was all around me, ever and always teaching me. The entire history of my life, from the day I was born (February 8, 1969) through the day I first set foot in a college classroom (August 31, 1987) to the day I last taught in a college classroom (September 29, 2005), has been a history of discovering and training and learning how to be a good teacher. Heredity? Environment? Experience? I had it all. And I use it all.
And so I share – is it inherited? assimilated? simply learned? – my parents’ healthy skepticism, if not outright scorn, for hot pedagogical approaches and boutique educational theories. Because I believe the same can be said of teaching that is said of golf: you can’t learn to do it by reading a book. Or by listening to a self-satisfied lecture. Or by wading through a self-indulgent essay. (Including this one.)
Oh, sure. I’ve picked up a few valuable bits and pieces along the way. The differences between visual and textual learners are especially instructive for someone who teaches communication in a multimedia information age. As are many of the ideas embedded in the theories of workshopping and collaborative learning. And I’ve always been a fan of both the great Jane Tompkins, whose A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, published the year I began teaching at Carnegie Mellon, made me think a lot about what I’d learned and adapted (and sometimes quasi-stolen) from all the great teachers I’ve ever had, and the late Wendy Bishop, whose Teaching Lives inspired me to think more deeply critically about composition and teaching and especially about how her ethnographic approach to the teaching of writing and language complements the kind of materialist rhetorical approaches I learned from my mentors at both Duquesne and Maryland.
The works of these women appealed to me, of course, because they reinforced – and forced me to re-evaluate – what I’d already seen and heard and learned. Because they, in effect, and even in the midst of their often deeply theoretical approaches, wrote and thought about teaching in ways that were grounded always in observation and practice and accomplishment. In applying real-life experience to real-world classrooms. In taking and teaching not only what you’d learned but how you’d learned it.
And so I do. Heaping helpings of Beth Hermann and Rod Hermann, bits and pieces of George Meiser and David Martin, of Patti Rittle and Fred Smith, of Albert Labriola and Bernie Beranek and Dan Watkins and Frank Zbozny, pinches of Perry Blatz and Jeanne Fahnestock, dashes of David Kelly and Millie Myers, stewed in the sauces of Herb Brooks and Cameron Crowe and Bruce Springsteen.
The bedrock foundations of Aristotelian rhetoric. The mechanics of E.B. White and Walter Nash and Raymond Queneau. The prose of Erik Larson and Dennis Lehane and Flannery O’Connor. The poetry of Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell and John Ciardi. The essays of George Will and Dahlia Lithwick and Dennis Roddy. The professional communication of Herb Kelleher and Steve Jobs and Lee Iacocca (at least until those damned “If you can buy a better car, buy it” commercials). The textbooks of Dan Plung and Kitty Locker and Mary Ellen Guffey. The graphic design work of Edward Tufte. The architecture of Rem Koolhaas. The Sin and Syntax of Connie Hale.
Know your audience. Know your purpose. Know your situation. Know your shit.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Attention, interest, decision, action. Grab ‘em, sell ‘em, clinch ‘em. Inspire ‘em. Write to express, not to impress. Be clear, concise, direct. Be purposeful, economical, receiver-oriented. Use the power of telling details. Harness the power of positive phrasing. Remember that your communication, like Abraham Lincoln’s legs, should be long enough to reach the ground. Remember that your words are your capital, and that you’re buying understanding. Know that the most valuable of all talents is never using two words when one will do. Think like a wise person, but communicate in the language of the people. Write every sentence, speak every word, like it’s your first. And your last.
Revise, revise, revise. Revise again. Revise some more.
What ideas underpin my teaching? All these and more. It's a practical, post-modern, pedagogical potpourri.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that all good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. If I have a pedagogical theory – beyond, that is, the theory that most pedagogical theories are a bunch of bunk and nonsense, ineffectual bullshit masquerading as inviolable insight – it might be this: All good teaching is wading through wisdom and opening your mouth.
Or perhaps simply this: Live to learn and love to teach.
I went through nineteen years of formal education, from kindergarten to high school, from college to grad school, from outside Philadelphia to inside Pittsburgh to outside Washington D.C., and I saw and felt and came to know first-hand the strategy and practice and execution of good teaching. Just as I saw it in my mother’s classroom. Just as I saw it in my father’s classroom. Just as I saw it in their friends’ classrooms. Just as I lived it at home. It was all around me, ever and always teaching me. The entire history of my life, from the day I was born (February 8, 1969) through the day I first set foot in a college classroom (August 31, 1987) to the day I last taught in a college classroom (September 29, 2005), has been a history of discovering and training and learning how to be a good teacher. Heredity? Environment? Experience? I had it all. And I use it all.
And so I share – is it inherited? assimilated? simply learned? – my parents’ healthy skepticism, if not outright scorn, for hot pedagogical approaches and boutique educational theories. Because I believe the same can be said of teaching that is said of golf: you can’t learn to do it by reading a book. Or by listening to a self-satisfied lecture. Or by wading through a self-indulgent essay. (Including this one.)
Oh, sure. I’ve picked up a few valuable bits and pieces along the way. The differences between visual and textual learners are especially instructive for someone who teaches communication in a multimedia information age. As are many of the ideas embedded in the theories of workshopping and collaborative learning. And I’ve always been a fan of both the great Jane Tompkins, whose A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, published the year I began teaching at Carnegie Mellon, made me think a lot about what I’d learned and adapted (and sometimes quasi-stolen) from all the great teachers I’ve ever had, and the late Wendy Bishop, whose Teaching Lives inspired me to think more deeply critically about composition and teaching and especially about how her ethnographic approach to the teaching of writing and language complements the kind of materialist rhetorical approaches I learned from my mentors at both Duquesne and Maryland.
The works of these women appealed to me, of course, because they reinforced – and forced me to re-evaluate – what I’d already seen and heard and learned. Because they, in effect, and even in the midst of their often deeply theoretical approaches, wrote and thought about teaching in ways that were grounded always in observation and practice and accomplishment. In applying real-life experience to real-world classrooms. In taking and teaching not only what you’d learned but how you’d learned it.
And so I do. Heaping helpings of Beth Hermann and Rod Hermann, bits and pieces of George Meiser and David Martin, of Patti Rittle and Fred Smith, of Albert Labriola and Bernie Beranek and Dan Watkins and Frank Zbozny, pinches of Perry Blatz and Jeanne Fahnestock, dashes of David Kelly and Millie Myers, stewed in the sauces of Herb Brooks and Cameron Crowe and Bruce Springsteen.
The bedrock foundations of Aristotelian rhetoric. The mechanics of E.B. White and Walter Nash and Raymond Queneau. The prose of Erik Larson and Dennis Lehane and Flannery O’Connor. The poetry of Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell and John Ciardi. The essays of George Will and Dahlia Lithwick and Dennis Roddy. The professional communication of Herb Kelleher and Steve Jobs and Lee Iacocca (at least until those damned “If you can buy a better car, buy it” commercials). The textbooks of Dan Plung and Kitty Locker and Mary Ellen Guffey. The graphic design work of Edward Tufte. The architecture of Rem Koolhaas. The Sin and Syntax of Connie Hale.
Know your audience. Know your purpose. Know your situation. Know your shit.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Attention, interest, decision, action. Grab ‘em, sell ‘em, clinch ‘em. Inspire ‘em. Write to express, not to impress. Be clear, concise, direct. Be purposeful, economical, receiver-oriented. Use the power of telling details. Harness the power of positive phrasing. Remember that your communication, like Abraham Lincoln’s legs, should be long enough to reach the ground. Remember that your words are your capital, and that you’re buying understanding. Know that the most valuable of all talents is never using two words when one will do. Think like a wise person, but communicate in the language of the people. Write every sentence, speak every word, like it’s your first. And your last.
Revise, revise, revise. Revise again. Revise some more.
What ideas underpin my teaching? All these and more. It's a practical, post-modern, pedagogical potpourri.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that all good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. If I have a pedagogical theory – beyond, that is, the theory that most pedagogical theories are a bunch of bunk and nonsense, ineffectual bullshit masquerading as inviolable insight – it might be this: All good teaching is wading through wisdom and opening your mouth.
Or perhaps simply this: Live to learn and love to teach.
Posted: Thu - September 29, 2005 at 10:30 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
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