People who don’t teach have no idea. Even non-teachers who are all “ra-ra-teachers” have only a slightly better idea. Broadway performers and circus sideshows have a clue. Only a teacher can know what it’s like to be on 24/7 for 10 months a year.
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So as a teacher, I was curious about the auto-notification that popped into my inbox recently “Five Principles of the Evil Teaching Guru” by Maxwell’s Demon. I mean, another person calling me evil? Haven’t teachers been beaten down enough already? But since it’s summer and teachers don’t work in the summer (right?) I had a few minutes to read. At first I read just the five principles:-
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1: Know that teaching is impossible (wait, what?)
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2: Believe that it is important to impose yourself (be a [buzzword] bully?)
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3: Do less (um, fired?)
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4: Confuse and take risks (“I’m confused.” No, you just need to remember your pencil.)
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5: Learn (ok, this one is good already)
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I was more or less horrified by these five principles. However, it was already a much different post than the title lead me to believe. Since the last one was “Learn”, I thought that there may be more to the story so I decided to keep reading. You know the old “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? Well, this should be recrafted to something along the lines of “Don’t judge a blog post by its subtitles” or something. You get the idea.
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“Five Principles of the Evil Teaching Guru
1) Teaching is impossible
The idea of teaching implies that you can be the active party in someone else’s learning. This is not really the case if you want to go beyond a little rote recitation and rule following.
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2) Impose yourself
Once you have accepted that you are engaged in a fool’s errand get arrogant, unless you are confident that you can persuade, cajole and trick people into learning for themselves, you will not be able to. In order to do this you must be able to gain some control, getting a classroom or individuals to listen to you. Without some form of control you will be ignored or even humiliated. Once you can gain control, however, please do not stop there. Many do, and they become the legends people complain about for years to come. Instead…
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3) Do less
Remember that what you do really does not matter. It is what your students do that matters. If you have opened up a class discussion and it is going well and on topic, let it be. The best state for anyone learning is when they go for it on their own, the teacher silent.
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4) Confuse and take risks
Now we are into the essential, but dangerous skill. There is certainly bad confusion, but there are good forms too. Again this is about what the student does, more than about you. The simplest thing is to simple “be less helpful” but you can take it further and take a risk. Make your students confused, make them fail, it can really help their journey to learning independent of you.
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5) Learn
I have used the term students throughout this piece, but that is wrong, try to drop it from your thinking. Take every chance to learn from the people you work with, make it a two-way engagement. Also never forget to consciously hone your craft. You might have explained how to do a certain problem hundreds of times, is there a new way to try?”
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How great is this post? I mean, I’m a bit hesitant to purposefully confuse my students as some find Math to be confusing enough, but this post reminds me that people appreciate more the things they find on their own and that it’s my job to make that happen. It’s the difference between finding a dollar on the street and having Mom give you one. The one from the street is way more awesome than the one Mom just hands over. What can you buy with a dollar these days, anyway?
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Really enjoyed hearing your journey through my post. Seems I managed to live up to principal 4 nicely. This post came from a teaching camp, great stuff, but far too much positive energy. I needed to clense by showing the value in more negative approaches! As for your dollar: http://cletusgotshot.bandcamp.com/track/working-poor
Oh wow, that song is awesome. I feel principle 4 is more for the seasoned (seaoned with what, really?) teacher who knows exactly what corners kids will turn and when and how to steer them out. I’m not there yet. Maybe someday. Thanks for commenting on my response to your response to teaching camp. See? I confuse myself already. Your post is awesome.
I agree that point 4 is a hard one, when you try to do it deliberately. On the other hand even teachers covered in salt and pepper (the best seasoning for teachers) often do it by mistake. It is too easy then to have the thought process “Damn I caused confusion, how can I be clearer”. Instead of looking to see if the students learned or not from the experience.
I taught Algebra last year to 8th graders, which is a year ahead of where it is traditionally taught. So you can imagine the population. I heard all the time, “I’m confused”, often by kids at the top of their games (what game they have at 14, that is), and tried hard to unconfuse them. The jump from pre-Algebra to Algebra is probably the biggest one in the string of Math courses, but this was not heard. I wish that a little confusion in the classroom was supported. It seems a lot of what people are looking for these days, especially with all the mandatory testing, is spoon-feeding and worksheets where everything is crystal clear from start to finish and no imagination whatsoever is necessary. Math is 90% imagination, so a lot is being taken away.
I agree, part of the reason I described these as principals of the “evil” teaching guru. They will make you a better teacher AND make it more likely that you are fired! My thinking on algebra, it is the first point when abstraction is build on top of an abstract topic (arithmetic) rather than just from the real world.
Math is abstract. If there are an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, why would we ever need the number 2? When I was a kid and asked my Dad why we need Math, he told me that it wasn’t so much the Math as it was the thinking process behind the Math. I agree with him and have told this to my students for the last 8 years. But this summer it dawned on me that Math is the key to the universe. This sounds corny, but it really is the way we model the universe and with fractals, even the natural world here on Earth. I mean, we model hurricane patterns with Math (chaos), we can model nautilus shellsand broccoli with Math. it’s a different kind of Geometry but still Geometry. Since you shared an awesome song, here’s an awesome video for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA
Of course this Math is a bit more advanced than the Math we do in high school, but on the other side of that coin is that Algebra is just the tip of the iceberg and dare I say…. easy?
I am more of a math skeptic than you. I agree that it is really powerful, and helps us see the world, but there is a danger in seeing order where it isn’t. As an example the Nautilus shell in the video is just a geometric spiral, and not necessarily a golden spiral. Similarly one of the most powerful aspects of chaos theory in weather prediction is telling us how much we know, rather than telling us what is happening. That said I do love the geometry of growth and structure, even been lucky enough to study and explore ideas in it.
You’ve got to check out how math and fractals have been used to make realistic landscapes. Here’s a wikipedia page as a start. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_landscape
Math might not get things exact – there are always going to be small mutations and whatnot from the environment – but CGI mountains look pretty good.
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