what makes a teacher?

 

I'm left handed.  The method of working with left handed children back when I was growing up was to make them use their right hands.  Simple.  I began to stutter and stammer so badly that no one could understand me.  Finally my folks took me to a progressive doctor who asked the question about my left or right handedness.  His advice was to allow me to use whatever hand I chose.  Presto Chango!  My stutter disappeared. 

But now for the rest of the story. 

My third grade teacher taught us hand writing(cursive).  She showed us how to turn our papers so that the upper right hand corner turned up so we could draw our pens across the paper in a normal manner.  Seeing this, I turned my paper so that the upper left hand corner was tilted higher.  It made sense to me.  But not to my "teacher".  She promptly marched down the aisle and twisted my paper to the "proper" position.  Without so much as a "how dee doo". 

This left me only one choice, if I were to write in a normal manner.  I wrote with a back hand slant.  Looked really neat to me.  But not to my "teacher".  "Go back and do it correctly", she scolded. 

The only other thing I could do was to write, "up and over".  By twisting my hand and wrist, I could write from above the line.  This meant that I often smeared the paper, but the letters all slanted correctly.  Sloppy, but properly. 

Many years later I taught myself to write normally, but the damage was done and I've always been a sloppy writer. 

That woman was not a teacher.  She followed her training, not her good sense.  A good teacher adapts each situation to what is going on around him/her.  The focus must be on the student, not on some hard and fast rule designed in the backroom of a professor who is being paid to [publish, not to teach. 

But we continue to believe that we can stack thousands of children into huge school prisons and "teach" them.  Wrong!  Just look around you for proof that it isn't working. 

 

Carl Jarvis