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NPR is starting off a series titled "50 Great Teachers" and is starting with Socrates:
We're starting this celebration of teaching with Socrates, the superstar teacher of the ancient world. He was sentenced to death more than 2,400 years ago for "impiety" and "corrupting" the minds of the youth of Athens.
But Socrates' ideas helped form the foundation of Western philosophy and the scientific method of inquiry. And his question-and-dialogue-based teaching style lives on in many classrooms as the Socratic method.
Most of us have been influenced by our teachers, and some of them may have even been great ones even if, unlike Socrates, they toiled in anonymity. So, I ask this question: Who were (or are) your greatest teachers, why, and what did you learn from them that made them so great?
(Score: 3, Informative) by fadrian on Thursday October 30 2014, @03:20AM
The internet. It teachd me ul mi goood, speling nd grammaare.
Really? I have about seven, but I'll not embarrass the others (should they ever see this) by naming names. What did they do? They noticed me. They allowed and encouraged me to use my time to challenge myself rather than sticking to lesson plans and curricula, especially when they'd seen I'd already mastered the material that was in those. They pointed me in interesting directions. They let me challenge them when it was warranted. And for that last one, I'll give a brief overview of one of my seven...
I went to school back in the old days in a rural community. To say that we ran about five years behind the rest of the world was giving us about twenty years too much credit. So there I am in 1973 and I need one more class in "Social Sciences" to have enough credits to get into college. My (extremely) small high school had one more class in that area that was available to me, a class called "Problems in Democracy" that somehow crept in from the 1950's anti-Communist days. Taught by one Joe Wartick, a lifelong Republican of the Bircher variety, it normally consisted of warnings about the dreaded international Communist conspiracy and pointing out how America was a shining beacon on the hill, and so on and so forth. If I were going to have to take this Neanderthal's class, I was at least going to have some fun. So I listened to what he was saying and brought in counter-examples, I brought in every fact that the other side brought to bear and there were days that it seemed as though he and I were going to come to blows. Classmates told me I got veins to stand out on the back of his neck. A lesser teacher might have kicked me out or at least told me to shut up. He engaged me. My papers were carefully corrected in the logic of their arguments. I didn't get A's in that class (I didn't get A's in quite a few of my classes), but I did get a fair B. I learned how to craft arguments. We both got a chance to sharpen our ideological knives. In the end, I got the credit and out of his class. However, while I was in that class, I was also working as an orderly at the local nursing home. Joe's dad was in the home, very old and in that living dead kind of state where you're not sure where their mind is because their body doesn't work well enough to tell any more, bedfast, the body wracked with muscle contractions, and all you're really trying to do is prevent bedsores, keep them comfortable, and wait for the inevitable, and you wonder if the laws against assisted suicide are simply there to make sure institutions like these keep getting their expected Medicare payments for as long as possible... Well, anyway, I helped take care of him. Joe came and visited his dad every week on Sunday evening. One week he didn't come. Monday, after class, he pulled me aside and asked me how his dad was doing. I reported to him that his dad was about the same. He was satisfied, but the fact that he asked me also taught me something about trust and responsibility. Last I heard (about twenty years ago) Joe himself was living in that same nursing home, teaching me that old age and decrepitude come to all of us (if we're lucky). By now, he may have shuffled off this mortal coil. And, in the end, I remember him fondly, even though I loathe his politics to this day.
That is all.