The Secrets of Timeless Teachers by Adams Jeremy S.;

Author:Adams, Jeremy S.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Find a Mentor in the Subject You Wish to Master

When a teacher attempts to discover new trends and expand knowledge, it leads aspiring timeless teachers to different models of instruction. Most substantive teachers can point their fingers at teachers from their past and say:

“I want to know what they know!”

“I want to be able to do that!”

“I want to make my students feel the way my teacher made me feel!”

Mentorship in modern American education is wise in conception but often formulaic in application. It looks the same in most states, with experienced teachers counseling novice teachers about the challenges awaiting a fresh teaching career. In most states, new teachers must complete a mandatory program in which they are paired with a veteran teacher. In my home state of California, BTSA (Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment) is a compulsory process for all new teachers.

There’s no doubt these programs are helpful to new teachers who benefit greatly from experienced mentors who know the complexities of modern American education, but finding a mentor that leads a teacher to become timeless is a very different type of mentorship than those mandated by state legislatures.

The type of mentorship that spawns timeless teaching is intensely personal and inspirational in nature, its genesis often a revelation to the person wishing to find a mentor. It involves the kind of pedagogic magic one encounters in Hollywood films about teachers—John Keating, Jaime Escalante, or Mr. Holland.

Indeed, the word “mentor” is too clinical and distant to describe the intensity of the dynamic—timeless teachers often find their inspiration in a teacher that is part swami and sensei, part friend and confidant. The diction of exhilaration used by English historian Adam Nicholson to recount the joy of reading Homer could just as easily be used by a student who has found a mentor: “There must be a name for this colonization of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past.”[24]

History abounds with examples of extraordinary teachers who became extraordinary because they sat in the classroom of a timeless teacher—think of Aristotle learning from Plato or the leading Renaissance artists apprenticed to the masters who came before.

Timeless teachers remember being students. They remember both the tedium and exhilaration of the classroom. They can harken back with perfect clarity to what it felt like to learn powerful material that tilted their perspectives of the world, sometimes dramatically. They recall the unfamiliar but thrilling sensation of bringing life into focus for the very first time. Sometimes the sensation is not wholly pleasant as they experience the unsteady but necessary mental vertigo of questioning assumed truths and orthodox understandings.

A student who has found a mentor believes in these moments that the world has changed, that the gravitational forces of one’s mental life have suddenly altered in order to free or perhaps grip him. Timeless teachers remember these rhapsodic moments and want to replicate them for their own students. However, they acknowledge that the origins of these moments begin with the inspiration found in another teacher, a link in the chain of timeless teachers.

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