What Teaching Really Is

I am a teacher, and I always have been, just like all of you. We teach whether we intend to or not, and one could argue that all cultures and all humans require teaching and learning in order to survive. We pass culture to future generations through teaching.

When we think of what teachers do, we typically imagine the classroom and someone up front, in command, engaged in particular rituals that are designed to impart knowledge. That's actually not what teaching, not what great teaching, is about. Teaching is not about the classroom, and it is not about how much anybody knows. I think great teaching is substantially about the relationship between the "teacher" and the "student." More often than you may think, these roles reverse themselves: the teacher becomes the student, often when we least expect it.

I am officially labeled by society as a teacher, and I "teach" at a community college. The very first time I formally taught was at a private university in 1974 when I was "in charge" of a Physical Geology laboratory section. I also moonlighted as a physics substitute teacher and an Algebra tutor. Strangely, I was never really good at those subjects. Then I taught Geology at Vanderbilt University as a teaching fellow, then again at a big North Carolina University, and finally at the University of Georgia. I taught Psychology at a community college in the 80s, and now I again teach at a similar college, my last leg of a strange and circuitous journey.

In the classroom setting, I still struggle with what it means to be an effective teacher: what one does specifically. What are the mechanisms for self-awareness, what are the measures for effectiveness, and what can one do to improve? I have an idea born of experience and a load of self-reflection, but I am woefully short on answers to most of these questions.

I do think that we must, as teachers, refrain from sitting on any arrogant, pedantic ivory stool. I think we must engage students at a personal level. I think we must challenge ourselves to be every bit the learner that we want our students to be.

And I think you must love your subject. If you don't like teaching, get the hell out of the classroom.