The Elements of Teaching by James M. Banner

Author:James M. Banner [Banner, Jr., James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1997-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Compassion

IN CONVERSATIONS concerning professional behavior, discussions of feelings are often dismissed as improper. Yet it is impossible to understand teaching without acknowledging the chief emotion that prompts and motivates it when it is at its best—a profound concern for students that springs from the heart as well as from the head, an irresistible desire to help the young overcome their natural weaknesses and to dispel all people’s ignorance. A remarkable teacher, one of the greatest the world has ever known, broke down and wept when brought face to face with the confusion and unhappiness that afflicted those who came to hear his teachings. “When he saw the multitudes,” Matthew reports of Jesus, “he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.”

When asked what they do for a living, teachers often describe themselves as promoting or professing particular subjects: “I teach English” or “I teach tenth-grade Latin.” Yet these expressions are elliptical. What the teachers mean is that they teach English to undergraduates or Latin to tenth-grade students. The best of them have chosen their profession not necessarily because they have great affection for adolescent youth, but because they believe that the language or science they teach is important to the development of other, usually younger, minds and because they feel able to impart certain kinds of knowledge to the students in their classes. There is in the best teachers a profound enthusiasm for conveying their subject matter, a zeal which is almost missionary in intensity, which frequently makes every effort they make to do so exciting—to teachers themselves as well as to their students. Compassion in teaching is therefore not simply affection; it is an emotional reaction to the ignorance of the young, which creates in teachers a desire to wrestle with ignorance, substitute knowledge, and establish order and certainty wherever students’ intellectual chaos and doubt are evident. Thus compassion is the basis for the necessary patience of teachers; no matter how inept or clumsy students’ attempts at grasping the material may be, compassion ensures that teachers, rather than being scornful or condescending, will be tolerant and understanding.

The word compassion is appropriately used to describe these attributes of teaching because it connotes experience as well as sharing. The original Latin components of the English word mean “suffering with.” Compassion is therefore inherent in teaching because teachers share with their students a sense of frustration, regret, and pain at the difficulties and struggles they must undergo to learn. It is not that students feel the same emotion but rather that their teachers remember the difficulties they experienced as students and are moved by that recollection. Those who have forgotten how hard it was to attain their achieved levels of mastery in a discipline will never be successful or happy instructors. The finest piano teachers remember their early struggles with their first five-finger exercises, the torment of the scales, and the stage at which the mere thought of playing anything that had more than three sharps or flats in a key signature prompted despair.

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