I was hoping I might hear from admissions yesterday, but no word. Because of the short time between now and the start of school and the massive amount of things I’d have to do first, I am particularly anxious about hearing the verdict. And what would I do if they said no? I won’t think about that now.
My mind has been all over the place in the past weeks, from certainty and clarity that this is something I want to do despite anxieties and shortcomings, to a grey dullness where I have no interest in myself and my future.
Started reading The Courage To Teach, another from SIT’s recommended reading list.
Quotes
“Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one’s inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge—and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.”
“In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self-knowledge. When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life—and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject—not only at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning. I will know it only abstractly, from a distance, a congeries of concepts as far removed from the world as I am from personal truth.”
“This book builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. The premise is simple, but its implications are not… My evidence for this claim comes, in part, from my years of asking students to tell me about their good teachers… Some lecture nonstop and others speak very little; some stay close to their material and others loose the imagination; some teach with the carrot and others with the stick.”
July 12, 2009 update: I began this book enthusiastically but lost steam as it got more abstract and I got more abstracted. Now that I’ve been admitted to SIT, I am so busy with logistics that I’m not even going to try to finish it. However, here are a few more quotes pulled from the early pages, before I deflated:
“[M]y ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood—and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning.”
“One student I heard about said she could not describe her good teachers because they differed so greatly, one from another. But she could describe her bad teachers because they were all the same: “Their words float somewhere in front of their faces, like the balloon speech in cartoons.”