A Good Teacher

So, I'm preparing for my second to last class for the year, and potentially my second to last class forever. From next semester, I'm committed to work solely on the research project I'm already on right now (we're developing a literacy curriculum for low-income children in cooperation with Sesame Street and Between the Lions!!) and so no longer have to teach for my tuition. Teaching has been a lot of work, more so than research will be I think, but I've enjoyed it. Yes, it's been stressful, but as always, rewarding in a perverse way only other teachers understand and appreciate...

So anyways, this is always my favorite lesson to teach- after 10 weeks of attending to issues of race, class, language and inequality, we're going to look at how their knowledge about these issues then informs their conception of the kind of teacher they want to be. I help them by introducing three models of teaching- the Executive, the Facilitator, and the Liberator. I've found that students understand these models better and identify with them easier when they see representations of them, so guess what I'm going to do? Show them clips from movies as examples of course! So here are the picks I used last semester which I'm going to use again, but I'm open to suggestion if anyone can think of others...

1) The teacher as Executive: This approach views the teacher as a manager of complex classroom processes, a person charged with bringing about certain outcomes with students through using the best skills and techniques available. Carefully developed curriculum materials and methods of teaching backed by research are very important to this approach.

Movie example: Stand and Deliver. The scene where Edward James Olmos tries to teach the group of misfit Hispanic kids about the concept of zero and gets them all to chant "A negative times a negative is a positive... "A negative times a negative is a positive..."

2) The teacher as Facilitator: This places a high value on what students bring to the classroom setting. It places considerable emphasis on making use of students' prior experience. The facilitative teacher is typically an empathetic person who believes in helping individuals grow personally and reach a high level of self-actualization and self-understanding.

Movie example: Conrack. This is an old movie way back when people were just beginning to think of Jon Voight as a sex symbol (yes, that's how old this movie is...). The scene is when he introduces a group of poor Southern African-American kids to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by tapping into their emotions and feelings about their surroundings.

3) The teacher as Liberator. This approach views the teacher as one who frees and opens the mind of the learner, initiating him or her into human ways of knowing and assisting the learner in becoming a well-rounded, knowledgeable, and moral human being.

Movie example: Dead Poets Society. I can't think of a scene that fits this approach better than the one where Robin Williams gets his students to rip the entire Introduction out of a poetry textbook because it reduced the value of poetry into a mathematical measurement. "Excrement" he calls it...

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse." That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
- Robin Williams as John Keating