Teaching: What it is and what it is not
If as a teacher, you think you are being watched, feeling self-conscious about what you are teaching, you will not be able to teach. You may feel like you are delivering, passing on what’s expected, but it will lack energy, focus, interest. It will not have heart.
Carrying an over-the-shoulder presence from the front of the room prevents you, as a teacher, from being in close relationship with your students. How can you attend to a concern that arises if you feel you have to complete the lesson plan, perhaps required by your department, no diversions allowed? How can that be teaching? If you believe you have to deliver, you will be a conduit of someone else’s demands. You will not be able to put your students first. If you focus on having to deliver, student feedback would be interruptive. Instead, you want to be open to what your students need, want, and hope for.
As a teacher, you intend to teach from your ”own rhythm requires attention and persistence,” being free to commit to your material, to students responses, and everyone’s openness to what transpires. When having to make certainty your focus, everyone is on a one-way street, you block out surprise, even miracles. Certainty is in endemic to delivery expected to be followed by a test, again and again. Students may have learned, but what will they take away? A grade after grade after grade. But will there be surprises, epiphanies, memories, miracles? Not likely.
