Fretful Porpentine (blog:
Quills) in the entry
"all Shakespeare, all the time" has several (IMO) nice musings (although that entry is somewhat about Shakespeare, and as you know I try to keep my posting about Shakespeare and things related to Shakespeare here to an to a minimum): i.a.:
Quote:All I knew was that this was the first time that anybody had suggested to me that maybe Shakespeare didn't believe in the Divine Right of Kings or the Great Chain of Being, and it was liberating.
I'd certainly agree that a good class is one at the end of which all of the participants know less than they did before. And I'm happy if this is considered as "liberating" (and I certainly intend it to be "liberating") though sometimes I have the impression that most often it is perceived just as "shocking".
And (next quote):
Quote:I tend to think of it as the old-white-guy-with-a-beard style of teaching, where you can wander in five minutes late, looking as if you had suddenly taken it into your head to teach a class that day, ramble a bit about current events or the books you bought over the weekend, and have it suddenly build to a complex and provocative point. It takes a certain classroom persona, and more importantly, scattered thoughts that are actually interesting; it doesn't always work, even for the old white guys with beards, but I loved it when my undergrad profs could pull it off.
Although my beard is greying: I'd still not try to
open a class like this: for several reasons:
- I doubt that anybody would get any relevant information from it - besides the one that probably I didn't prepare well enough for that class.
- I rarely buy books over the weekend.
- Students might be tempted to try to imitate that style for their own presentations/papers (some of them sometimes seem to be inclined to that style anyway), and fail, and blame their failure on my having given an inefficient example.
- I don't feel like a guru. And hopefully I'll never feel like a guru.
- If that sort of teaching is well done: it seems to emanate wisdom. But wisdom IMO can't be taught (nor learned); IMO it can only be acquired; and in the best of cases we can teach how to acquire it. I strive to teach methods and some (more or less random) bits of content, which might (hopefully) lead to some knowledge and paideia (in Aristotle's sense).
- When confronted myself with the "old-white-guy-with-a-beard style of teaching" (yes, a long long time ago I was a student too) most of the time I first had the impression to have understood something deep and important. When then asking myself what exactly I had understood: I found out that I didn't know, that I did not understand what I had understood: I was not able to make those deep and important bits of wisdom operative. And I'm conceited enough to doubt that this was entirely my fault.
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