174 Teaching Minds

174 Teaching Minds Rule #1: A teacher should never tell a student anything that the teacher thinks is true. Now, on the surface this seems ridiculous. How can you resist telling students the truth? Isn’t that your job as a teacher? No. It isn’t. Why not? Because, in general, students wouldn't believe you anyway. Stu- dents don’t take what teachers say as gospel. And, they tend not to remember what you say. I have taught many a class and asserted X only to be told minutes later that I had asserted not X. People don’t listen very well. So what is the point of saying true things, besides feeling good about having said something wise? The point certainly isn’t teaching. How will students learn what is true, then? By discovery. By fail- ure. By repeated experience. By talking with people about what they think and having to defend their claims. Not by listening to you. Let’s consider mistake #2. Mistake #2: Believing that a teacher’s job is assessment What does this mean? In the real world, teaching and assessment are usually conjoined. Teachers teach and they also give grades and test. This is a problem. It is a problem because satisfying the teacher becomes a goal of the student that tends to supersede learning, and it is a problem because as the ultimate arbiter of truth, a teacher gets to say what is true and students have to believe it. To fix this a teacher needs to not be in this dual role. This is easier said than done, of course. I used to tell students they would get an Ano matter what they did as long as they handed in the work that I asked for. This had the effect of having many students sign up for an easy A and having the administration become annoyed with how many A’s I gave out. Both of these outcomes were entirely pre- dictable. But what I did, changed student behavior in the class greatly. They often wrote about how much they wanted to please the teacher and how once I took that out of the equation, how much it changed their view as to why they were doing anything at all. For some, it had a very bad effect. They just didn’t take the class seriously. Others took it more seriously than ever because they were the judges of their own work. (I asked them to defend their viewpoints to the class during class time so their friends were also judges.) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023920