The "How" of Teaching

The quote by Strauss above on teaching is sadly not a sentiment I can say I share with him—something I've inherited from his thinking. I chose it instead precisely because I do not yet grasp the wisdom of his remarks and would like to understand them better. Since learning that I would be teaching at Andover this summer, I've been wondering about the question of how one becomes a good teacher. I've put this question to some of my favorite former teachers, but not even my bullheaded curiosity was enough to seduce a satisfying answer out of any of them. I came back with surprisingly little, excepting one comment that I only understand in hindsight. This might make sense to those more experienced, yet it's frustrated me more than I thought it would. How is teaching so mysterious an enterprise that no one can give me an account of it?

Until this summer, I think I've assumed that being passionate about a subject and being able to teach it well are probably synonymous. After all, isn't this passion what one sees most of all in an excellent teacher from one's seat at the desk? Perhaps this can be refined by saying that loving a subject would be enough to become a great teacher. That is, it's a requisite for carrying a person through the teaching process, but not so powerful that it makes one good from the start. We could say it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for excelling. So, if a person already has the love of the subject, how does he gain the rest of what is needed to really excel as a teacher? Often, the choice is to pursue the route of education programs and degrees in “education.” I put this in quotes because I'm not sure these programs really teach education per se, i.e., its telos, its nature, or why it is worthwhile to devote oneself to it. My sense is that they teach methodologies, procedures, and management skills that could apply to any number of disciplines. Does this decrease the learning curve for teachers in any measurable way? I have trouble imagining that data received like this would be a substitute for the actual experience of teaching in real-time. It's like trying to address the question of how to ride a bike without ever touching the bike—it seems dubious to address the “how” question in this context. Why not spend these years instead in mastering a certain branch of learning and increasing your love for it all the more? In my very limited experience, this approach fails to understand the nature of the object; it suffers from the same flaw as my initial question.

The art of teaching, on another view, can't be captured in statements that are inherited or received as facts from those who know. This is precisely why we call it an art. What I had not grasped in my questioning is that teaching is more analogous to learning to play Tchaikovsky or to paint. We learn these through practice, and it is by virtue of this that we call them practices or arts. Teaching is none other than such a practice: it is learned only through continuous practice and development over a period of time. It seems that one has to experience the practice first and only afterward can it be understood. As with the virtues, we become good by doing good acts, and this though the constant work of aiming to do good. No wonder I was not getting satisfying answers.

The knowledge that teaching is a practice, then, still leaves one wondering how to proceed with the practice. The piano teacher, if asked, could give step by step instructions for a student who wants to progress from a beginner to a concert pianist. First learn this scale, then learn this arpeggio, then study this and that piece, and practice all of this many times over until you begin to gain proficiency. Where is the analogue in the practice of teaching? Even if there is no definite sequence to the process of becoming a good teacher (and I hope there is), how does one discern the guiding principles of the practice? The short answer for me is that I do not yet know. Thankfully, I've found myself in a place that acknowledges the value of the practice of teaching. For this summer my job is not only to assist my teachers, but to be mentored by them in the context of the classroom. As trite as it is, experience will be my guide—the experience of teaching for the first time, of observing a teacher who has experience, and of letting his experience inform my practice as we go along. The teaching art is mimetic art as it is with many of the others: it is learned by imitation. This is the same principle as in ethics, that becoming virtuous begins with imitating good men; we become what we model.

Knowing that experience and practice are so essential quiets the urgency of my initial curiosity. But this whole discussion, we should note, depends on a much larger question about the purpose of education generally. The questions about how to teach are actually subordinate and hence secondary to the larger question of the end of liberal education as a whole. The order of knowing demands that we confront the end at the beginning. It makes little sense to think about how to teach until we have decided on why we teach, on what result we hope to accomplish. Leo Strauss, a political philosopher and educator, takes this a step further by saying that the means is in fact only known through the end: “One knows [the how] once one knows what education is meant to do to a human being or once one knows the end of education.” How is it possible that the how is revealed once the telos has been demarcated? How is it that the efficient cause is contained within the final cause of education? I wonder what kind of gems lie embedded in Strauss' suggestion. The questions indicate to me that he might have in mind much more than an intellectual apprehension of the goal. I think I have some notions about the end(s) of liberal education, but less of a sense about how these are accomplished. On the other hand, I may be worlds away from really understanding these goals. For now, what I have learned is that 1) excellence as a teacher comes only with much practice, imitation, and failure (I am sure) and 2) that it may be fruitful to pursue this idea that the means is somehow implicit in the end. Here's to the lifelong pursuit of mastering the art.