Penny Thoughts: The Good Teacher

Good teachers are born, not made!

Having come from a family of educators and having spent my life as a philosopher of education, I have come by this pithy rubric as a fundamental precept in the quest to impart knowledge. 

While we spend our dollars as students of the discipline of education at some of the nation’s “best” education colleges, and our tax dollars in support of such pursuits, the bottom line still rests with the fact that students deserve the best we have in the classroom. How we get “the best” for this effort is open to debate. What constitutes that same echelon is the focus here.

Do we, indeed, can we, truly train willing souls to become good teachers, or are those great souls amongst us who intuitively and easily impart knowledge attracted enough to the education establishment to become part of it? 

In the search for criteria which denotes good pedagogy, it seems that anecdotal evidence can serve well here, for each of us can claim to have had “the best teacher ever” at some point in our lives as students.

For some of us it was the early elementary teacher whose innate compassion and calm demeanor guided us through the first few lessons in a structured learning environment. For others of us, it was that teacher who took time to assist us in developing a pet project or in mastering some algebraic formula. It may have been the speech teacher, the debating coach, or the music teacher who allowed us to see something others could not see. 

In all, whomever the teacher was, she or he left an indelible imprint on our learning process, and, thus, set the standard by which all other teachers were measured. In short, this teacher was a master of pedagogy – the “art” of teaching.

For me, there were a precious few who filled this bill: my junior English teacher in high school, Ethel Lawrence; a leprechaun-like biology professor in my undergraduate days, Dr. Roland Holroyd, and my Ph.D. dissertation advisor, Dr. Morton Teicher. They all had a common element – they made me want to do better, and they made me feel good about doing so.

While Lawrence taught me the solid basics of good writing – “Remember who your audience is, Arthur,” she would incessantly admonish – and Teicher gave me full reign in the development of a life-long ambition to earn a doctorate, but with the caveat, “It’s alright to end up in left field, just show us how you got there.” But here I want to share a bit of Holroyd, since he taught completely outside of my major academic interests.

Roland Holroyd was a pedagogist with a charisma I have seen in only a precious few. He handled us raucous young men in the all-male Christian Brothers institution with the finesse of a veteran toreador, and we all loved it. He could make cellular division in the hydra a fascinating adventure into the history of the entire cosmos. He was honored as an outstanding educator by countless institutions, including Yale and Harvard, along with Stanford. 

And he had countless seniors lining up to “take Holroyd” just so we could say we did so, and it did not matter what the course was. We could just say “I took Holroyd” with that certain hint of arrogance warranted by being allowed to take one of his courses. I signed up for biochemistry as an elective to audit. When it was over and now 50 years later I am still the better for it, since it was he who showed me what real pedagogy is.

The formula, you see, was simple for Roland Holroyd. We discovered it after the last lecture was completed and he was receiving our thanks and well-wishes before we had to return for the final exam. Someone asked him, “Professor Holroyd, what makes you such a good teacher?” After the obligatory protestations that he was, indeed, a good teacher, and with some more prodding, he said, “Boys, you know the old saying about leading a horse to water, but not being able to make him drink, well, you can make him drink…IF you ‘salt’ him.” What a formula!

Good teachers, great pedagogists, all know how to “salt” their students. It is not something which can be taught in the classroom to become a certified teacher. It is something that is a God-given gift. We all know those dedicated pedagogists who somehow find us where we are, then take us where we should be in their courses. 

That was Roland Holroyd’s vehicle to achieve what Socrates exhorted us to do as educators. Socrates said, “We must be ‘midwives’ to ideas!”   Properly “salting” students was Roland Holroyd’s modus operandi to being a “midwife” to ideas.

Those who make us want to be better than we ever considered, and those who make us feel good about the endless possibilities in our developmental lives are the ones who have “salted” us and become the best “midwives” to the births of our ideas. And the ability to “salt” comes with those who have it when they are born.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of The West Alabama Watchman.