Tag Archives: teaching

PROMPT: Online Course

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What’s the best online course you’ve ever taken?

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I’m doing a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course presently that is well done. However, I wouldn’t say that I’ve had sufficient experience to make any comparative statements. Most of my education was in the days when you went to the same room the person teaching you was and at the same time they were there. But I knew when self-checkouts came along that we were weaning ourselves away from the last vestiges of non-optional human contact.

BOOK: “Health, Healing, and Beyond” by TKV Desikachar (Trans. by R.H. Cravens)

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Health, Healing, And Beyond: Yoga and the Living Tradition of KrishnamacharyaHealth, Healing, And Beyond: Yoga and the Living Tradition of Krishnamacharya by R.H. Cravens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – FSG / North Point Press

I was eager to read this book because I found Desikachar’s “The Heart of Yoga” to be one of the most important books for yoga practitioners. The book under review is in large part (but not entirely) a biography of T.T. Krishnamacharya — T.K.V. Desikachar’s father and arguably the most important figure in the development of modern yoga. Krishnamacharya was sponsored by the King of Mysore to build a school at the palace, and luminaries such as B.K.S. Iyengar (prop yoga,) Pattabhi Jois (Ashtanga Vinyasa,) Indira Devi (the Russian-born Johnny Appleseed of Yoga,) and others came to be his students.

The book not entirely a biography. It might more accurately be described as an exploration of Krishnamacharya’s philosophy that use stories from his life to elucidate his lived philosophy. Readers will find that the building and maintaining of health is a major element of Krishnamacharya’s philosophy, but perhaps not so much that they find the title apt. The book also spends a fair amount of time on other topics such as yogic ethics and an approach to teaching.

I continue to respect Desikachar’s candor and lack of dogmatism. He discusses his father as a teacher and parent, warts and all. The lack of dogmatism seems to reflect the apple not falling far from the tree. Throughout, Desikachar emphasizes that his father, whatever his faults may have been, was tolerant and saw yoga as a no-strings-attached gift to the world. Krishnamacharya did not require his students, not even his son, to adopt any particular religious belief – despite being a believer himself.

I’d highly recommend this book for all yoga practitioners.


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PROMPT: Teacher

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What makes a teacher great?

If students choose the teacher, that is an excellent first indicator. In the typical top-down selection of teachers, it is easy to produce an abundance of shitty teachers. Of course, there is still the danger of charismatic bullshitters and easy people-pleasers, problems ever-present. But among students (as opposed to followers) they usually reveal themselves in time.

“A learned man came to me once” by Stephen Crane [w/ Audio]

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A learned man came to me once.
 He said, "I know the way, -- come."
 And I was overjoyed at this.
 Together we hastened.
 Soon, too soon, were we
 Where my eyes were useless,
 And I knew not the ways of my feet.
 I clung to the hand of my friend;
 But at last he cried, "I am lost."

PROMPT: Alternative Career Paths

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What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?

1.) Teaching English as a Second / Other / Foreign Language

2.) Grand Emperor of the Spiral Arm

“On Laozi” by Bai Juyi [w/ Audio]

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"The ignorant speak, while the wise keep silent."
 I read the words of Laozi.
 But if Laozi knew the Way,
 Why did he write those five thousand characters?

BOOK: Caged by Brandon Dean Lamson

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Caged: A Teacher's Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the MinotaurCaged: A Teacher’s Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur by Brandon Dean Lamson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

In Caged, Brandon Dean Lamson tells the story of his time teaching inmates on Rikers Island, finding himself in conflict both with students and with the guards. There is definitely a unique culture to the world of incarceration. I found myself thinking about the Stanford Prison Experiments in which ordinary people were randomly assigned to play either inmate or guard. The subjects’ behavior changed during the short period of the experiment, guards becoming more domineering and sadistic and inmates becoming more scheming and duplicitous than these people were in their regular lives. One sees evidence of this strange power dynamic and the resulting unusual behavior throughout the book. Lamson and the other teachers and staff involved with the school often saw the guards as vicious fascists, but – at the same time — they couldn’t trust the prisoners because learning was never an inmate’s top priority but rather was a combination of survival and maintenance of status.

As interesting as the story inside the wire is, it’s equally fascinating to learn what happens with Lamson outside his workday. The author is forthright about changes in his own psychology as he developed a need to work out his own violent tendencies as well as uncharacteristic sexual behavior. Lamson describes time spent in a boxing gym and S&M dungeon in service of these changes.

The book also offers some insight into what teaching methods worked or didn’t. Some of this pedagogical insight might be exclusively applicable to jails and prisons, but some would likely be of use to regular teachers, particularly in dealing with troubled or challenging kids. Lamson is also forthright about his own teaching missteps and failures, while offering the reader insight to what he learned from those teachers who seemed to be unusually effective.

I found this to be a fascinating book. It’s well-written and thought-provoking. I’d highly recommend it for readers of nonfiction.


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PROMPT: Teachers

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What makes a teacher great?

If a student (or students) voluntarily and enthusiastically come to learn from an individual, that individual is a great teacher.

The emphasis is on “to learn” because some people confuse great charisma with great pedagogy, but such people go to the charismatic person to take comfort from being in that person’s presence, not to learn — despite whatever truisms or clever-sounding parallel grammatical structures the charismatic individual might spout.

So, if one would go to an individual seeking knowledge, knowing the experience will be challenging and not merely comforting, one has found a great teacher.

BOOK REVIEW: Teaching Artfully by Meghan Parker

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Teaching ArtfullyTeaching Artfully by Meghan Parker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in page

Out: May 4, 2021 in India (It may be out already where you live.)

 

While I’m not an art teacher and this book is clearly directed at art teachers, I took away a number of useful lessons nevertheless. The book is laid out as a comic book, and is meant to extol the virtues of that artform while at the same time conveying knowledge about art, teaching, and the teaching of art.

The book is organized into seven chapters that are loosely themed according to the seven elements of art: line, color, form, texture, shape, space, and value [in the sense of the level of lightness / darkness.] The connection between the artistic characteristic and what is conveyed in its chapter is more readily apparent for some chapters than for others.

Chapter one (Line) both presents how the book came to be and what the intention behind it is, and also has something to say about process. The second chapter is entitled “Color,” and it touches upon issues such as the nature of aesthetics, the value of the notion of embodiment to the artistic endeavor, and the role of imagination. Chapter three is “Form” and it explores how time, space, and story play into conveying knowledge, as well as offering insight into how form influences perception. The next chapter is “Texture, and it has a lot to do with interaction and human relationships as they pertain to the art classroom. “Shape” investigates the issue of boundaries, such as what really differentiates artist from non-artist, the grammar of comics, and the role of the teacher. It also presents a number projects that might be introduced in the classroom or in one’s self-study. “Space” is probably the most literal title as it discusses the classroom space as well as the more figurative space given to students. The final chapter (Value) has a lot to say about frames of reference and the analogy of painting frames to the frames that individuals operate in and see the world through.

There is a Conclusion that provides some summation of ideas, and there are also notes and a page of references. This book shined a spotlight on a few other books that intrigue me, but that would have been completely outside my awareness — given I don’t read much about the visual arts, but I’m increasingly finding it to be a topic of interest.

As I said, even though its outside my bailiwick, I took away some intriguing lessons from this book — particularly about how variations in the elements of art encourage different emotional and psychological responses. There are a few excellent quotes as well. These powerful lessons weren’t in every frame. A fair amount of space is devoted to both platitudes and [hopefully] cathartic rants about the challenge of being a teacher, and particularly a teacher of art.

The book is festively drawn and colored and (as befits a book focusing on the visual arts) I got even more out of how ideas were portrayed visually than how they were discussed textually. The book takes a light and whimsical approach, and is pretty to look at.

If you’re interested in learning more about the visual arts, I’d highly recommend picking this book up.

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BOOK REVIEW: Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman

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Up the Down StaircaseUp the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

 

This is a humorous novel about a rookie teacher’s first year in a New York City public school with all the frustrations and victories that experience entails. It’s an epistolary novel – meaning it’s conveyed through a series of documents. Some of the humor is of a “kids say the darndest things” nature – though these are high school students, so the humor isn’t so much born of naiveté as it is a combination of teenage snarkiness and a maddening ignorance of concepts that students should have grasped by that age (i.e. laugh so you don’t cry style humor.) The humor from kids is largely conveyed by students’ comments in the teacher’s comment box as well as via homework assignments.

There’s a second kind of humor in the form of bureaucratic absurdism. Bureaucratic wrangling and lack of resources cause most of the protagonist’s frustrations. This humor is largely conveyed through memos – some school-wide and some specifically to the protagonist, Sylvia Barrett. Barrett also commiserates with her co-workers, and we see some of her frustration playing out through the post-it note equivalent of water-cooler conversations.

The epistolary form offers a challenging format for both character development and story presentation. However, the novel is strong on character development. It achieves this in large part by mixing long-form letters to a close friend with the short memos and comment box entries. The reader gets to see events unfold and responses by way of different documents. The longer letters give us some depth of feeling. There is even a point where Barrett is being swamped by correspondence and we hear nothing back from her, and in this we can feel the degree to which she is overwhelmed.

The book isn’t story-centric. However, there is a narrative arc that revolves around the question of whether Barrett will stay on at the public high school or move on to teach at a liberal arts college. She is torn because she feels she can do good at the public high school and that would be satisfying, but at the same time she is bureaucratically frustrated and demoralized by perceived failures. There are dramatic events here and there to elevate the tension from the run-of-the-mill school events, but not so much that the book ever moves away from feeling like the real experience of a rookie teacher.

The book uses drawings here and there, usually presented as student doodles, to add to the humor.

I enjoyed this book, finding it to be both humorous and illuminating. I would highly recommend it for those interested in the challenges of secondary education or who can appreciate the [bittersweet] humor of it.

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