Teaching, Instruction, Education

Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.

"One of the first things I learned about teaching is that you have to respond to each student individually. You don’t start with any idea of what they should be doing, who they’re supposed to be, or what their performance level is, and you don’t compare them to one another. You simply start with each one of them wherever they are and develop the process from there.

“…I would think that the most immoral thing one can do is have ambitions for someone else’s mind.”

The course material changes 15% each year, as the book currently in progress becomes part of the course years before it is finally published. I detect incoherencies and mistakes in the new material while teaching. This leads to refinements or even throwing stuff out from the forthcoming book. A good way to learn about something is to teach it.

Unfortunately, the program met its end because the show’s approach opposed the contemporary standard format of children’s television: teaching kids how to read, rather than Reading Rainbow’s objective, which was to teach kids about why they should read.

Reading Rainbow had a long run, lasting twenty-three years, but its cancellation feels like a symbolic blow. Education, just like climbing the ladder, must be balanced between How and Why. We so quickly forget that people, especially children, will not willingly do what we teach them unless they are shown the joys of doing so. The things we don’t do out of necessity or responsibility we do for pleasure or love; if we wish children to read, they must know why.

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows - that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

Rousseau’s Emile argued that education is the cultivation of inherent faculties, rather than the imposition of knowledge. Taking this path, Pestalozzi recast the teacher as a protective figure who follows and stimulates the child’s inherent intelligence.

How to be a great painter cannot be taught in words; one learns by trying many different approaches that seem to surround the subject. Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions on how they would have done it, or what might also be tried, more or less as the points arise in the student’s head—which is where the learning is supposed to occur!

Diderot’s solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker.

Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones.

Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.

In the end, teaching is a matter not of method but of heart.

The teacher actually is right and always will gain confidence
when he admits that he does not know, that he cannot decide, and,
as it often is with color, that he is unable to make a choice
or to give advice.

Besides, good teaching is more a giving of right questions
than a giving of right answers.

This book presents results of a search, not of what is academically called research.

In addition to the dedication of this book, I should like to state that my students in color have taught me more color than have books about color.

The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument.

Rather than convey “be like me,” better parental advice should be more indirect: “This is how I lived” invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits “Therefore you should…” Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.

Intuitive leaps that open up a problem are impossible to test using multiple-choice questions. These leaps are an exercise of associating unlikely elements. There is no correct answer to the question “Are city streets like arteries and veins?”

When I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G.E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, ‘I think very well of him indeed.’ When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said that it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures. — Bertrand Russell

“You have to develop students’ confidence and prove to them in their own performance that there isn’t anything they won’t be able to accomplish technically, eventually, given a lot of application, before you can begin to convince them that that kind of technical virtuosity doesn’t deserve the focus they have been led to believe it does by a performance-oriented culture.”

“Once you learn how to make your own assignments instead of relying on someone else, then you have learned the only thing you really need to get out of school, that is, you’ve learned how to learn. You’ve become your own teacher.”

My attitude toward Alexander’s teachings prior to experiencing the places and spaces realized in his practice was akin to what Alan Watts said about certain teachings in The Bible:

Sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, commandments are not given in the expectation that they will be obeyed, but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them.

Today, my answer is unequivocal. My interpretive lens: literal. Time and again, across cultures and continents and islands and oceans, in five different places now I’ve examined the evidence, and am persuaded.

Nicht nur einmal: immer wieder.

Admittedly, though, however alert and aware I felt, I was probably more aware of the effects the lecture seemed to be having on me than of the lecture itself, much of which was over my head, and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute’s presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or ‘connecting’ with the students. In other words, the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father’s term 'no-nonsense’, and why it was a term of approval.