Here's why I was so concerned about that pedagogy issue, and it's a conclusion I've come to with W over the last couple of weeks:
I have spent most of my life convinced that there's one "right" way to do anything, and that my task is to find out what that one right way is, whether anyone else is willing to lead me to it or not.
And here's why it matters: it's not true. I know that it's not true. There's not one right way to teach a Shakespeare class; there are any number of effective ways, and I'm welcome to choose among many models or generate my own. But. There's still the rub that drove Renaissance philosophers crazy: I may know the truth of the matter, but the deceptive feeling sometimes carries more power. This affected my high school career, my college career, my grad school career, making me averse to taking intellectual risks even as it made me good at being a student.
I'm not sure whether to cast this as a problem, or as one of those personality traits that I've developed over time--a quirk, as it were. Nor do I think it's unique to me. I do know that it's there, though, and that's a start.
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Gentle Sir Philip Sidney, thou knew'st what belong'd to a scholler; thou knew'st what pains, what toil, what travail conduct to perfection.
About Me
- Piers
- West Tennessee, United States
- "I am grown at length to see into the vanity of the world more than ever I did, and now I condemn myself for nothing so much as playing the dolt in print . . . . There is nothing that if a man list he may not wrest or pervert. I cannot forbid any to think villainously, Sed caveat emptor, let the interpreter beware; for none ever heard me make allegories of an idle text."
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3 comments:
Wow, just looked back at your earlier post on this topic--cool that you have so many voices chiming in. Gives you lots to mull over.
I've been working on my teaching philosophy statement on and off over the last couple weeks. Citing the introduction from my current draft might help clarify my current pedagogical preoccupation.
"Many of today’s undergraduates want prodding. Seated beside every self-motivated, self-confident student is a peer comfortable with listening to class discussion who lacks skill at making an entrance, another who wants to improve her writing but is wary of asking for help, and, occasionally, a fourth who withholds effort of any kind until directly and vigorously stimulated. As a member of the English Department’s Peer Review Committee for three years, I observed a number of classrooms in which students were neither shaken into passionate activity during class discussion nor stirred to apply themselves when faced with group work and peer-editing. My own courses, by contrast, wed instruction and modeling to an array of in-class activities and out-of-class assignments that together demand a sustained effort from every student."
just call it "leave no chucklehead behind" (or "canuckle-head, if your any X-Men fan)
I'd say that while there isn't one right way to do it, there most definitely are those ways of doing it that fall in your "sweet spot."
And we can, experience tells us, work to make that sweet spot bigger.
Hmm. Maybe I'm betraying my underlying conviction that much of education is a racket?
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