Thoughts on Teaching

Journal Thoughts on Teaching, Part 1

• If you’re not a good teacher, can you be a good chair?
• Being a chair will hurt the quality of your teaching.
• Good leaders and teachers tolerate and encourage students and employees to discover their own ideas and journeys.
• Leaders and teachers who try to make everyone agree and follow them, who want to clone their ideas, are neither good leaders or teachers. They are intellectually dishonest, and weak.
• Leaders and teachers are in the people business.
• The best teachers are both popular and demanding.
• Most of your students are forgettable. Concentrate on the good ones.
• Better a C student with passion than an A student who is boring.
• The worse student and employee is a know-it-all.
• If your students can’t or don’t challenge you, you probably don’t challenge them. And you’re insecure and probably not a good teacher.
• Not all good teachers teach the same way. But all good teachers like students.
• Just being organized and prepared doesn’t make you a good teacher. But being unprepared and unorganized will make you a bad teacher.
• When you’re talking, students probably aren’t learning or thinking. They learn and think when they’re discussing, and doing and asking you questions.
• Professors who try to mold students to follow their opinions are unprofessional. Students are not to be used for political purposes.
• Faculty who are afraid of student evaluations have good reason to be.
• Good teachers never are.
• Some good students and good professors won’t get along. Don’t take sides but treat each with respect. Schedule around or substitute to avoid personality conflicts.
• Failing a student should hurt. You will hurt.
• We must teach students to think, to observe, to gather information, to analyze and organize it, and to prepare to present it.
• We must teach students to adapt.
• Spoon feeding facts to anyone is not education.
• You have to stay as up to date as possible in your discipline. Being a chair makes it harder.
• Students are entering college with declining thinking skills.
• Commencement is one of the most enjoyable days for good teachers.