The art of teaching

I’ve been retired from teaching at the college for three years now and that’s enough time to give me perspective on the profession I chose for myself and the way I’m handling life without it.

I didn’t fall in love with teaching right away. I kind of sleep-walked through my first experience as a college student which ended without a college degree and joining the police department in Tulsa. But that’s when things changed. Congress passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration bill (LEAA) and in the bill was a program called LEEP which provided paid tuition for all current police officers which would be excused for every year of service after the loans. I and a score of Tulsa Police Officers signed up for this program and attended the first Criminal Justice degree program in Oklahoma at Connors State College in Warner. Most of the guys were there for the free ride (getting a college education without having to pay for it) but for me it was a second chance to do better than I did the first time around and I dedicated myself to that.

Because I was taking education seriously this time around, I noticed something about professors I hadn’t noticed during my first experience. They were just like other workers in other fields. Some did just enough to get by, some were okay but not exceptional, some were gifted and some had that unique ability to not only love the subjects they were teaching but love the students as well. It became very obvious very quickly that the latter category contained the most successful teachers as well as the most admired and respected teachers. I never forgot that lesson.

When I became a professor myself, I promised myself to emulate that successful category of teachers to the best of my ability, realizing the things that made them stand out from everybody else. In Sociology, we were concerned with who, what, where, when, why and how but my interest always focused on the final two. You don’t have to be intelligent to look up facts. Anybody can do it. In fact, I know several people here in McCook that are close to being walking encyclopedias when it comes to factual knowledge without having very many analytical skills at all. And the latter is what makes for an educated person, not the former.

I told my students every semester that I learned the second time through my educational experience how exciting it was to go to bed with more knowledge than I had when I woke up that morning. Knowledge being not WHAT happened but why and how it happened. Those mysterious and rare occurrences tell us more about the universe we live in than all the facts put together. Every generation uses old knowledge to discover new knowledge. That’s how we develop new inventions and new ways of looking at things that have been around forever. For example, thanks to carbon dating, we know the earth has to be much older than 6000 years old as some religious groups still believe. To continue to deny that is to deny the existence of facts and if we do that, then it’s only a short trip back to the Stone Age.

If you go to any college or university in the country, you’ll find sections of courses that fill up very quickly and other sections that don’t fill up at all. And believe me, it’s not based on the difficulty of the course. It’s based on the expertise and the ability of the instructor or professor to transmit that expertise and ability to his or her students. The professor doesn’t always have to be loved by all either, but they must be respected . When a student realizes a professor has dedicated their lives to teaching the students all they know, they build up a regard for that professor whether they’re interested in the subject matter or not.

My students kept me young, alive and alert way past my prime and I failed to realize how much I would miss them and the courses I taught because they’re what kept my mind and body alive; exploding circles as my philosophy professor at the University of Oklahoma put it and wondering what new things would be discovered tomorrow. So many of us have ideas, norms and values that are centuries old and they’ve never been challenged by the people who hold them. If that’s the way it was then, that’s the way it must still be now.

If those people would just open their eyes, hearts and minds, they would discover that nothing could be further from the truth.