I don't romanticize the teaching profession; over the course of my scholastic career, I had some good teachers, some bad ones, and a lot of mediocre ones. My former history/geography teacher stood out not just because I learned so much about those topics from his courses, but because he also trained his students to discipline our minds and thought processes. If only more teachers saw their role as showing students how to think and learn, rather than telling them what to think.
It was election day in Nova Scotia on Tuesday, and so after work I toddled off to exercise my right to vote. My polling station was in a small Anglican church a few miles from my house, and when I had presented my voter information card and I.D., I was directed to one of the voting booths. To my surprise, the person who handed me my ballot was my favourite teacher from when I was in high school. After I emerged from the booth and dropped my ballot in the box, we chatted for a couple minutes, and then I headed home. Later as I was cooking supper, I spent some time thinking about what had made that man the most memorable- in a good way- teacher of my school years. He had taught me two different subjects: grade ten geography and grade eleven European history. The things which he taught me still linger in my mind, unlike admittedly, some other subjects I studied at the time (organic chemistry, for example). I can still identify and talk intelligently about the drumlins, tarns, oxbow lakes, and sheep rocks I studied in geography, although I don't talk about them because I like having friends. Also, his European history class not only provided me with a good overview of the development of Europe through the ages, but with a thirst to learn more about it. It led me to do a lot more reading and studying on my own time. I didn't love these classes because they were easy: on the contrary, he assigned more readings and homework than any other teacher I had in high school. He was also constantly giving us quizzes and tests; we had to do field reports in geography and research papers in history. I worked harder for his classes than for any other but never begrudged the time or effort, and I was a lot prouder of the good marks I got from him than I was of the ones I got in classes I didn't have to work hard in, like English. So what made his class/ teaching so great? Well, to begin with, he was himself enthusiastic about the subject matter of these classes and this enthusiasm was infectious. He also had a gift for imparting knowledge to his students without dryly lecturing or talking down to us. Rather, he would often perch on the edge of his desk and ask challenging questions about an event or issue (mainly in history) we were studying and encourage discussion, frequently playing devil's advocate to make us consider issues from differing angles. We seldom knew what he believed about these things; while he would challenge and debate, he never pushed an agenda in his classes. He taught us how to think about the class topics, but never what to think, which gives him points over a lot of teachers and professors nowadays. Also, while he ran an informal class, I don't remember any students acting up or causing disruptions. He treated us as though we were capable of mature and civilized discussion, and we were eager to prove him right. I'm sure a lot of our arguments and opinions weren't half as clever and intelligent as we thought they were at the time, but he listened to, encouraged, and challenged them. He also insisted in both our oral and written arguments that we back up our assertions with facts. At a time when university students are shrieking hysterical nonsense which has no basis in reality, and are being coddled and submitted to by the pathetic administrators at their schools, I can only think back with nostalgia to a time when some teachers still expected scholarship, rationality, and respect- for themselves and for others- from their students. I don't romanticize the teaching profession; over the course of my scholastic career, I had some good teachers, some bad ones, and a lot of mediocre ones. My former history/geography teacher stood out not just because I learned so much about those topics from his courses, but because he also trained his students to discipline our minds and thought processes. If only more teachers saw their role as showing students how to think and learn, rather than telling them what to think.
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