My sister and I have two different problems. When confronted by something that offends our very core she struggles to be cruel while I struggle to be kind. So when I heard of what my nephew's kindergarten teacher had to say about him this time (and why she thinks he should be held back) I imagined my sister hearing it, frozen in silence, too pained and stunned to say anything until later when she'd relay the story in her rapidly increasing pace. Of course being the sibling who doesn't shy from confrontation I imagined talking to (or talking AT) the teacher, boiling over with self righteous rage and indignation, going over my case for my nephew point for point, and then when that's not enough I go into my case against her -- breaking down all of her flaws to every last detail -- then I unhinge my jaw. . .
Uh. Yeah, well it was a lot of negative thinking. So I decided to unfurrow my brow and save cultivating those premature lines for another day. Instead I focused on what makes a good and effective teacher.
It seems to me that the best teachers I've ever had were storytellers. They were animated, dramatic, and they could be talking about the birth of Shakespeare and you'd swear they were there. Sometimes their stories weren't relevant to the course, sometimes they were about things they did in school that got them into trouble, sometimes it was about their favorite pastries, or the roommate from hell, or their most embarrassing moment. The best teachers were vulnerable, sharing not only their passions but their most humbling experiences. Their stories made you excited to learn. Their stories made them human. Their stories made you feel OK with being vulnerable. If students aren't willing to be vulnerable then they won't take risks or challenge themselves or defend a position. A student who can't be vulnerable will gravitate only towards the courses they excel in, answer only the questions they know for sure, and be more likely to follow the crowd no matter how wrong or boring the crowd might be.
Teachers who are strict disciplinarians, who have no stories and are unwilling or unable to tell them -- and who often make learning seem more like a punishment than a privilege -- are consumed with never being vulnerable, offering no incentive for a student to be.
Sometimes a student's vulnerability is abused by a teacher. I still remember the fifth grade teacher who asked a girl to read and ridiculed her in front of the whole class because she could barely read. The girl was held back, something I'm not totally against -- except for in the many cases where the exact same methods applied once are reapplied, hoping for different results. Yes, she couldn't read, and yes she was held back, but she never learned to read well. We had a high school science class together and she stumbled over the words then, too. By then she spent the lab hour discussing the many middle aged married men she hooked up with after meeting them over the internet. She belonged to a small unpopular group of girls who spent 9th through 12th grade swapping their low self esteem and lack of ambition for the satisfaction that some pervert out there wanted them and was willing to cheat on their wives and break laws for a chance to touch them. Of course, there are a lot of factors that lead a child on that course, and there are a lot of potential factors for illiteracy, but I know a teacher who humiliates a young child doesn't help. But, my fifth grade teacher wasn't a storyteller and she sure never told us an embarrassing story about her.
Not all "good" teachers are storytellers. I had many teachers who were kind and caring and would help a student who was struggling, but they weren't as effective as the storytellers because they couldn't lure a student into a subject that didn't interest them, and they couldn't form the same trust a storyteller could.
Although I think the pressures facing children and teenagers make K-12 the most important place to have storytellers as teachers I think it would be beneficial to the college level as well. Having taken online classes at community college I find they all lack stories. There are certain things teachers (and students) can't or don't express in text but they express them when they speak. I did have an adjunct faculty member who used video lectures. Although the lectures contained instructional information that could have had the same effect had they been typed it was still promising.
To the naysayers of The Story, those corporate education model lovers who believe literature and the arts should fly out the window, and even to the well meaning social worker that came to JCC and described stories as being valued in the working class world but not so much in business/middle class world, I MUST DISAGREE! In fact, it was fairly recently that the boss of my boss's boss told us that she wanted STORIES, exact details of what happened, when, how, who helped, etc. exact examples of what we do, because the stories are so much more effective than figures or vague explanations, she wants more of them, the CEO wants more of them, because stories are essential to truth and understanding. I work in a conservative private sector industry. If they want stories, I'm thinking stories aren't just for kids.
