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So Obvious It Hurts
On basic things still being learned
By pretty much any metric, I have been a master teacher for a long time now. I’m sure that reads as somewhat conceited, but I’m equally sure there is no colleague I have who would call it into question. It’s not due to any special talent for the work, I have just been doing it for a long time now. Kids born the first year I was a teacher are now legal adults. If you work at a thing for that long, you are going to become pretty darn good at it, almost despite yourself.
But as much as all of that is true, I’m by no means a finished product. Teaching is a funny thing in that regard. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe every job (or at least the creative, idea-work-type-ones) are the kind of thing you can always get better at. I don’t have any rigorous data to support this belief, but it feels about right to me. There are always new things to learn, some of which are always painfully obvious in retrospect.
I offer the following recent example from my own working life.
Some context first: For as long as I can remember, I have always run a discourse-focused classroom. I won’t get too far into why I feel like discourse is a central element of my pedagogy, but I have my reasons. It has basically ever been thus. I don’t want to talk at my students, I want to talk with them. I want them to talk…
