So often it seems that people- students, professionals and even teachers themselves- become eager to share their criticisms about how poor the majority of teachers they’ve encountered along their way have been when such a topic is brought up in conversation or a lesson as it was in our case here at TESOL. It’s discouraging to watch as the teacher at the front introduces the idea of poor teachers and then quite quickly, in fact in no time at all, a chorus begins and crescendos to a peak where it remains suspended as everyone else desperately voices their own displeasure and their own pain of times they’ve tried to learn from someone who wasn’t very good at allowing it to happen but should have been. My voice was missing from that displeasured mass of sound as long ago I realized I learn through observing and listening others and allowing myself to develop my own understanding, rather than trying to guess what the teacher (or anyone) was trying to get across to me… so as the class went on, I remained true to what is natural for me and I observed and listened and developed my own understanding.

I listened to the complaints and groans of painful memories… to experiences of anxiety and frustration at the impatience, ignorance and selfishness… whatever criticisms they had for their former teachers. I wondered, while hearing all this, how if so many people (if not all of us) have had such horrible past teachers and their impact is still so fresh and apparent to us, then how do bad teachers still exist. If it is such a universal problem and so many people have so much input about the topic, then how is it still a problem? How is it that it hasn’t been corrected? The reason, as I understand it, is that most people who decide to pursue the profession aren’t willing to do what is necessary with themselves in order to help others… which is basically all teaching is… helping others learn.

Teaching is sharing information with someone so that they might understand it themselves. In order for a person to become an effective teacher, they must first be comfortable with being a person, comfortable with their own humanity and be able to let go of the selfish, desperate grasp they have on their title as a teacher and all that they think it should imply like status, entitlement and perfection. A teacher must be willing to be real at all times. Joseph Addison once said, “I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.”

Henry Brooks Adams said, “A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops.” From observing my class it’s apparent what a teacher actually teaches his students. It’s not the material presented but how he presented the material that impacts the students and affects them for the rest of their lives. The affect doesn’t stop at the student, but influences how his student affects others they encounter and this pattern continues for as long as all of these people keep talking and keep sharing the information they learned from their teachers with others. So when a teacher presents information with an expectation that the student should learn the information quickly, or at all, and becomes frustrated and impatient when his expectation isn’t met, then it is this impatience and frustration and this expectation that is taught instead of the information that was meant to be learned and it is that impatience, frustration and expectation that will be passed on and shared with others in the future.

To quote Amos Bronson Alcott, “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.” Teaching isn’t about us teachers… but the people we attempt to teach. The focus isn’t us teaching the students but for the student’s to learn and grow as people. It’s not following the lesson plan that is the priority in the classroom but adapting the lesson plan to nurture student’s learning and development.

For us to become effective, true teachers we must first get beyond the titles of teacher and student and all the misconceptions that accompany them. We are people sharing information with other people. We need to realize that while in front of the class we are vulnerable to only those things we wish we were invulnerable to. For us to become teachers we must keep in mind all those influences from past teachers that made us afraid, uncomfortable or unable to learn from. We must move above thinking that we were taught nothing by those people and open ourselves to the possibility that what we were taught wasn’t what was intended but instead their negative influences, their impatience at unmet expectations.

We must realize those experiences and make them a priority of each lesson we prepare. What we teach them now about teaching and learning will be taught by them and learned by others again in the future. We need to know that along with learning information we also demonstrate how we exist and coexist as people… demonstrations that students will trust instinctively and mimic instantly. It isn’t us that we should want students to follow but their own intuition and their own needs as people. It’s not what we say that will affect others but the ways we say it when we’re not trying to… when we are real, without knowledge of an audience. To become true teachers we must understand the risk of what influences we may be passing on to those we are attempting to teach ourselves and be altruistic enough to be willing to change our approach for our students’ sake instead of continuing on embracing our ignorance.

Colin Underwood
20/06/2007