While writing last week’s post I recalled two teachers who long ago changed my life. Who knows where I might have ended up had I not encountered them. And in a world where student performance on standardized tests has become the mechanism to measure teacher performance, I must say my transformation had nothing to do with such a measure.
No one in my immediate family had ever gone to college. I did not score high grades in the public schools and was clearly on a road to a blue-collar job after high school. As a teenager I managed to find a part-time job selling shoes and decided that if I took a few business courses at the local junior college I might be able to eventually become a store manager. And all that time I was also flirting with the unrealistic belief that by dabbling in radio I might be able to become a big time rock and roll disc jockey, which of course was the highest calling in life!
I had not attended junior college very long when it became dramatically clear that I was not connecting with the accounting and introduction to business courses I was taking! As a result one of my fellow students advised me to enroll in a philosophy class that he was finding very exciting. My first response was, “What the hell is philosophy?”
But it was that course in philosophy, and the exciting world of ideas it represented, that began my transformation. It was there I learned how to think, how to analyze issues, how to solve problems, and how to write. And it was there I learned that if I could be evaluated on those variables I could excel.
So from there I enrolled in a history class. One day the professor invited me to join a discussion group he was starting with some of his students. I reminded him that I was not doing all that well on his quantitative tests, but he responded, “Yes, but you can think, you love ideas, and you write fairly well. Concentrate on those strengths and you will be fine.”
And so in less than one year, professor of philosophy Johnathan Winter, and professor of history James Hartnett changed my life forever.
Geography, inherent strengths and weaknesses, economic conditions, family realities, all these determine each student’s immediate possibilities. In an inner city situation, for example, initial success might be merely helping a child gain self-confidence about rising above his or her immediate predicament. Or for a budding writer, artist, or even entrepreneur, masterful teaching might be simply nurturing inherent talent and not allowing difficulties in other disciplines undermine creative achievement.
The bottom line is that a master teacher will have the capacity to help each individual find and develop his or her strengths. Personal attention and mentoring just takes too much time and human compassion for it to happen while endlessly pushing students to memorize facts for standardized tests. I will be forever grateful that I encountered two professors in a junior college in York, Pennsylvania that understood that!
Larry D. Lauer 