> I think that the form in which the teacher deliverd his
> presentation was not the most effective, to say the least. People
> do not like being lectured
Young teachers often end up lecturing more than they would like, because they haven't quite mastered all the classroom tricks yet, and more importantly, because they are nervous and find it excruciating to wait -- silence is scary when you are standing in front of a lot of people, even (or especially) your students! -- till students get going on their own.
Here's a teacher's funny and poignant look back on the first year of his teaching.
Revelation by Michael D. Yates Legal pad in hand, I strode into the classroom trying to look confident. Forty mostly young faces watched me, probably wondering how heavy the workload would be and how easy the grading. I lit a cigarette and passed out a stack of note cards. In those days you could smoke in class, and I burned up three or four "Lucky Strikes" or "Old Golds" per 50-minute class. I told the students to place their names, addresses, and phone numbers on the cards as well as the reasons they were taking this course. I had teachers who had done this, so I thought it would be an appropriate thing to do. Plus it took up a few minutes, as did my description of the course and explanation of the requirements. Fifty minutes is an eternity to a new instructor, and I had already begun to tremble over the thought of a 150-minute night class. Unfortunately, introductions, including a roll call, took only 15 minutes, so I had to start teaching.
Looking up at the ceiling I said, "Economics is the study of how societies allocate their resources to satisfy the unlimited wants that people have for goods and services in the face of the limited means which societies have to satisfy these wants." I began to explain this in terms of the "production possibilities curve" illustrated in the textbook, a 500-page tome used in schools where the more sophisticated and more famous textbook written by Paul Samuelson might be too difficult. A few weeks later, I would walk into my office to find another teacher and a student huddled over my copy of Samuelson which they had apparently retrieved from my bookshelf. This teacher, an old windbag who taught speech and believed that all a person needed for success was "enthusiasm," was excoriating me for Samuelson's alleged communism. I told them both to get the hell out of my office.
The production curve showed that a country could not have whatever output it wanted because it did not have unlimited resources. Therefore tradeoffs had to be made; on the graph the tradeoff was between "guns and butter." As I turned from the blackboard, on which I had drawn the curve, I started to explain why it was concave to the origin. Inadvertently I looked directly at the students. Their faces were glazed over with incomprehension and boredom. In a panic I drew out one of the index cards from the pile on the desk. "Mr. Miller, can you tell us why the curve slopes downward and to the right?" Mr. Miller looked up at me with wide eyes and shrugged his shoulders. "Got me," he answered. The class tittered, and, mortified, I answered the question myself. It would be more than 10 years before I called on someone directly by name again. And I ditched the index cards.
FULL TEXT:
<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/yates291005.html>.
P.S. Don't miss the photo of Yates, circa 1972, on the page!
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>