On Teaching — the art of transferring knowledge to the student(s)
Over the years we have all had our encounters with teachers good and bad. Our impression of them often is influenced by the passion they exuded for the subject, or the passion they infused in us to study or understand the subject. But considering that every class that is taught is filled with a diverse group of students, how does the teacher appeal to everyone in the class? Is teaching a form of communication where knowledge is attempted to be transferred? Or is it a process of generating curiosity in the student? How does a teacher educate the varied group of students in a class? Can a teacher actually teach the diverse student base in his or her class? Is a good teacher one that can teach a majority of students in the class?
Over the years at work and at home I have always questioned myself when I have struggled to come to terms with my inability to be a good teacher every time. Is it the student or the teacher who is to blame if a student doesn’t learn or comprehend a concept? Different people learn differently, some by memorizing, some by recognizing a pattern — mentally, visually. The simplest things are sometimes the hardest to teach. It’s easy to get discouraged when after a few tries knowledge is not transferred. We tend to blame the learner and not the trainer. When we take a personality test such as Myers Briggs or one of the others, it helps us learn about our personality and those of others and helps educate us on how we can better communicate with each other. I remember getting bogged down by an analytic boss who had little trust in my abilities. When I told him the answer first he always wanted me to go through all the details and explain how I got to the answer. Once I learnt he was an analytic it was easier to handle him. Why is this process of personality profiling not something that a teacher uses in the classroom? Wouldn’t it make his/her job as a teacher more easier?
My experience at learning has been very positive and I have spent hours teaching myself stuff. But it’s always easier when you have good teacher (someone who feeds me info the way I like it). I can easily reel out a list of my favorite teachers. If I did so and shared it my high school social group, I will probably get hate mail from several class mates who hated the teachers that I loved. Now there in lies the mystery, the same teacher could be great for some but make life miserable for others. In reality if you plotted the teachers preference by students it would probably be distributed normally about some mean for an average teacher and skewed one way or the other for a bad or a good teacher. What this shows is that to be an effective teacher the teacher has to adapt his delivery to suit the learning style of the student. Clearly that would require additional effort. Most teachers probably spend most of the time rehearsing the material they are about to teach and spend less time thinking about the students in their class. A teachers ability should not be measured only by their knowledge of the topic, but they should be graded on their ability to adapt their style to their students.
My experiences as a teacher has not been that good. I remember thinking about a career as a teacher but ran away from it. I remember all the bad teachers I had had in college and high school and I sure did not want to be one of them. Teaching someone else is hard work. You start by teaching them what you understand. When we learnt a particular topic we wired our neurons in a particular way so the knowledge got ingrained in our brain. Now based on whether the knowledge was basic or complex the wiring can be in a single dimension or multi-dimensional. But the basic knowledge could be imbibed and circuited by different people differently. So when we teach algebra to a group of kids some will find it to be easy for they can see the same patterns we do. But others who don’t recognize the same pattens are unable to comprehend what we teach. Our high schools and K-12 system dreads these pupils for they impact the school and the districts rankings. They are afraid to admit that they don’t have the right teaching skills to teach the latter group of kids. I came to this realization through my experiments teaching algebra. The more I dwell on it the more I can realize that root cause of the problem was not my student but my own inability to explain things differently. A good analogy to this could be some text books where the author(s) tries their level best to explain things the way they crystallized the knowledge in their brain. I remember many books that I found to be awful purely because it wasn’t written in a way I could understand.
Online education is making this worse. Most of the teaching videos out there are not designed for the visual learner who recognizes a different set of patterns than a conceptual learner. We need technology and learning videos that cater to a diverse audience. We need school and university systems that cater to diverse group of learners. If we do that we will find that we can easily develop more young minds. We also need to institute metrics and recognitions for teachers so they can understand their biases and work to improve their skills to teach. With online education it should be easier to find and share different ways to learn the same topic. Teachers need to spend more time thinking about how to teach their student and less time administering and grading tests, which could easily be automated. The value of the education is not the degree but the knowledge transfer. I would rather have learnt something than got a degree. In the quest for grades and GPA the learning has been lost. Grades are not a measure of learning but just short term memory. Learning happens when permanent connections are made in our brains. Teaching is a form of communication and good teachers are excellent communicators. Maybe we should get our excellent communicators enrolled as teachers. We teach them stuff and have them then train the students. Teaching is the noblest of all professions and we need more teachers. But we need teachers who are in it to transfer knowledge not just tell their students what they know.
