A trip to the Cooperstown Hall promotes fame and nostalgia in the world of baseball. Here we will consider fame and nostalgia from another point of view.
Specifically, imagine a place where our very best teachers were honored and permanently housed: The Teacher Hall Of Fame. For many years, college students in human development class were asked to make their nominations to the Hall and explain why the accolade should be bestowed. Such an exercise inspired mild interest if not enthusiasm.
So to warm up to the activity, students were first asked to nominate their very worst teachers to the Teacher Hall Of Infamy. Such catharsis! Hurts, resentments and grudges carried through the decades propelled each nominee: A fourth grade teacher who expertly shamed nine year olds into compliance; A second grade teacher with parts of a fifth grade math curriculum, freezing over the brains of little seven year olds, and adding a dollop of shame (“he even makes his 8’s backwards”); high school teachers of history and literature who droned and drained the life out of the grandest and most horrific tales of fact and fiction. So much of this was like a classroom bloodletting ceremony followed by a curriculum burial. Masters of humiliation, these teachers could sniff out children with no answer to a question and put them on center stage.
And of course, there were the corporal punishment purveyors who rapped tiny knuckles and left no marks.
For many in the human development class, these unforgotten times seemed like a lonely one-off. Many asked “Am I the only one”, only to discover the universality of those awful, awful school days. Then the question would arise: just why were these teachers so bad?
Initial guesses targeted the character and substance of each instructor which fell on a continuum from bad to evil to “better talk about this after class”. But more informed ideas emerged. These teachers did not understand the age-related, psychosocial import of autonomy, initiative, competence and identity. Instead they controlled the classroom by invoking their toxic opposites: shame, guilt, inferiority and identity diminishment.
This all out failure to understand what kids feel was complicated by a failure to understand how kids think. Looking back, many human development students felt misunderstood as kids, with lessons either above or below their cognitive sweet spot. And by the way, how did teachers make The Big Bang boring?
Very young children think in pre-logic like little space cadets for whom the world is magic. Teachers who squelch fantasy in the name of yet to be formed logic harm mind and spirit. By seven or so kids begin to reason concretely: concrete logic…”the early bird, catches the worm” is the tale of a hungry bird! Only later, does abstract reasoning develop…the benefits of good starts and early rising.
Hall Of Infamy nominees failed to understand cognitive processes and that made children feel frustrated, bored and stupid. As adults studying psychosocial and cognitive theory, many students reported the mental calm that comes with a deeper understanding of what happened in those classrooms of old.
That set the stage for the Teacher Hall Of Fame. After the infamous, the Fame nominees were accompanied by stories of laughter and gratitude and praise. The second grade teacher who taught arithmetical borrowing with flair, “they thought I borrowed one cup of sugar but it was eleven cups…Ha!” There was a teacher of social studies, a thespian of an instructor, who impersonated every single one of the famous explorers. And the athletic coach who taught unrecognized at the time life lessons of focus and grit, that were deeply appreciated in subsequent years. There was the teacher that stayed after school with patience and kindness to help with reading.
These teachers understood what the Philosopher meant by “the highest state that can be attained is wonder”. After all, before developing hypotheses, testing them, drawing conclusions and dissemination, before all of that, comes a question, a state of not knowing. Such a state is not a sin as those awful teachers claimed but instead, the beginning of knowledge. The know-it-all-mind has no room for knowledge to enter. Curiosity must be fostered; no bad questions…
Blessings from so many past teachers. Send one a letter; make a call; have a visit. Join with them and celebrate in that Hall Of Fame.
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