what teaching is to me

I've been thinking a lot about what a teacher is to me, and why I value the role a person assumes when they take on the mantle of "teacher." I have always admired teachers.

These are the thoughts that come to me when I think of a public education in BC: My sister is a teacher, my stepmother when I was a child is a teacher. When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I have admired several of my teachers. In first grade one day, they were testing the fire alarms, and I was terrified and crying. My teacher held her hands over my ears. I particularly liked Mr. O'Malley in grade 6. We had Russian penpals. My 10th grade English teacher made Shakespeare come alive for me. Not all of my teachers were great. Some were just okay, and some I didn't like at all. Like my 9th and 10th grade French teacher, who didn't seem to enjoy teaching.

This is also something I've noticed over my long and convoluted college career. My father pointed out to me that some profs are good teachers, and I should keep trying to take their classes if I could. My Social Work School has as many sessional instructors as full time instructors, and I really notice this distinction amongst the sessionals, who are professionals in the field with a masters level degree who teach one or two courses a calendar year. Some are excellent teachers, some mean well. The teachers that are excellent you try to work with as often as possible. Like my favorite political science dept prof, Rita Dhamoon. She has a PhD, she writes articles and speaks at conferences. I've taken a class in Gender/Feminist POSC, and I am currently taking her Politics of Multiculturalism class. She invites us to be radical, to deconstruct ideas and theories, to look at what's going on underneath. She is so inspiring!


But this is just the pathway to what I'm trying to distinguish. Teach is an important word, in my opinion. But I have noticed this thing in radical unschooling where people don't like to use that word. Like it's a bad word. Like learn is so much better a word. For example, I was reading a thread in a forum on radical unschooling, and people were discussing late readers, kids who were 8 or 9 who couldn't yet read, or at least not at the level that they were interested in reading. Kids who would get frustrated and stop trying. Some people commented that their kids didn't get reading until about 9 or 10, and one person said that by 15, the kid was reading at a college level or writing a story or something, and not to worry. However, there was this other element in the thread about how one girl was so frustrated, and her mom kept telling her it was like riding a bike or learning how to walk, that you couldn't be taught to read, your brain had to be ready and then you'd just get it. And another person commented that maybe the mom thought she could teach her to read and so she was subtly getting some message, but the mom said that wasn't the case, she truly believed she could not teach her daughter to read.

I don't get it. What do you mean, you can't teach someone how to read? Maybe I just truly have no experience with people who are not natural readers? I was chomping at the bit at the beginning of 1st grade. I couldn't wait to learn to read. I could probably have learned to read at 3 or 4, if I had been taught. My kids are like that too, both my son and my stepson. Natural early readers. But teaching was a big part of that - learning the sounds of the letters, learning some basic phonetic rules so you know when to use a hard vowel or a soft vowel, the teacher reading to the learner, moving your finger along under the words as you read, etc. Isn't that teaching someone how to read?

I guess I should explain what a teacher is to me. A teacher instructs you and drills you sometimes, yes indeed. But a teacher is also a mentor. A teacher requires compassion, an ability to see the world from another's perspective. A teacher is someone who creates a space for the learner to step into. A teacher holds that space, a space of the wonder and joy of education. So a teacher may not do anything, because it is about who the teacher is being. A teacher is passionate, inspired, a person who can communicate the joy of learning, of knowledge, and who can pass the flame to the next generation.

So this is why I feel that teach is too important a verb to dispense with altogether, despite any possible negative connotations it may carry. Because it is so much more than those.