Re: unteachable? everybody is!

[Lee Hammer <lhammer@culver.edu>]

At 01:27 PM 2/3/96 -0600, you wrote:
> nobody "teaches" anybody anything. "Teaching"  is a the serendipitous
>coming together of teacher with student who is interested in and ready to
>learn what the teacher happens to know something about.

Eric:

You've come so close to verbalizing what I've been wanting to that I'll jump
in here.  Not only do I rarely worry about the "what" of what I'm teaching,
but often I fake not knowing in order to invite my students in.  I hardly
ever think about "enteraining" students, but I think all the time about how
to "interest" them.  And what I take "interesting them" to mean is getting
them to wonder about ideas and issues, getting them to feel like they have
some honest-to-goodness personal connection with those ideas, but most of
all getting them to feel that have as much right as anyone to command,
challenge, or revise the material.  After all, isn't the real goal of higher
education to liberate individuals from teachers (eventually)?

Actually "interesting students" for me is a wonderful challenge of
subversion.  I think successful teaching is getting students interested
without their knowing it happened.  And often when I'm working particularly
hard on recalcitrants, the others get even more subverted by coming to my aid.

One more thing: it does me a lot of good to sit "out there" every so often.
Nothing helps me more with the "interestingness" of my teaching than for me
to be stuck in a CCCC concurrent session (for instance) that is boring me
out of my gourd.  I often use such occasions to reflect on what could be
going on at the front of classrooms.


Dr. Lee Hammer 
Associate Professor of English
Culver-Stockton College
Canton, MO