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I was doing some cleaning on Saturday and came across a list I'd written down 40+ years ago of all the teachers I had up until I started graduate school. It was a longer list than I would have guessed, about 70 names, some of them listed multiple times because of multiple classes with them. The list includes all the PE teachers I ever had, at least half of whom I now have no memory of at all. The list does not include any of the art and music teachers who dropped into our regular grade school classes once a week for an hour. The list does not include all of the TA's I had in college for lab or discussion sections of big lecture courses. I never knew at least one of those names. (I accidentally cut the first session of that discussion group and never felt the need to learn the guy's name.) And I quickly forgot the names of some of the others. I started thinking about the good and the bad teachers, and since I did a little teaching myself I started thinking about what makes a good or a bad teacher, and thought it might make a good meme.
1. Where did most of your early teachers come from? Was that important?
Most of my grade school and several of my high school teachers came from southern Missouri, the Ozark Mountains, a region not exactly famous for academic and intellectual achievement. The result was many of the kids spoke better English than their teachers who were after all college graduates. My fifth grade teacher didn't know how to correctly pronounce the word "theater;" my high school advanced chemistry teacher could not correctly pronounce several words important for chemistry including "formula," "oxygen," and "chlorine." Did any of it matter? No, we kids accepted they were from southern Missouri and we pronounced the words correctly despite our teachers. A couple of times in college I ran across professors mispronouncing words that the students began copying because, obviously a professor would know what he was doing. The worst example was a professor from the hinterlands of Mississippi, who kept saying a word as 'spat-ee-uhl.' It was months before I realized he was trying to say the word "spatial," and failing. But what he'd been saying all along did suddenly make more sense. ( Read more... )
1. Where did most of your early teachers come from? Was that important?
Most of my grade school and several of my high school teachers came from southern Missouri, the Ozark Mountains, a region not exactly famous for academic and intellectual achievement. The result was many of the kids spoke better English than their teachers who were after all college graduates. My fifth grade teacher didn't know how to correctly pronounce the word "theater;" my high school advanced chemistry teacher could not correctly pronounce several words important for chemistry including "formula," "oxygen," and "chlorine." Did any of it matter? No, we kids accepted they were from southern Missouri and we pronounced the words correctly despite our teachers. A couple of times in college I ran across professors mispronouncing words that the students began copying because, obviously a professor would know what he was doing. The worst example was a professor from the hinterlands of Mississippi, who kept saying a word as 'spat-ee-uhl.' It was months before I realized he was trying to say the word "spatial," and failing. But what he'd been saying all along did suddenly make more sense. ( Read more... )
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