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04 Oct 08
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really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call “counterintuitive” but to the teacher means simply being honest.
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The good teacher is sometimes willing to be a little ridiculous: he wears red or green socks so a kid will always have an excuse to start a conversation with him; she bumbles with her purse to make her more maladroit kids feel at ease.
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The great enemy of knowledge is knowingness. It’s the feeling encouraged by TV and movies and the Internet that you’re on top of things and in charge.
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students don’t rebel against eccentric, surprising teachers. They rebel against eccentric, surprising teachers who take themselves too seriously. Students can’t bear being preached at; they can’t bear being addressed as if they were a town meeting.
They also tend to rebel against teachers who jump the tracks. As inspired a grade-school instructor as Ludwig Wittgenstein could be, he was inclined to pull the hair of students who didn’t get their math facts down fast enough. There were moments as a teacher when he seems to have become positively demonic — and then regretted it: at one point he ended up going house to house apologizing to his pupils and their parents for his classroom excesses. Eccentric teachers, for all their gifts, for all their inspiration, can be dangerous.
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But a college education is about more than acquiring negotiable skills and knowledge. It’s also about figuring out who you are and what you bring to the world. It’s about understanding that your existing self-conception may leave a lot of things out or may be radically inaccurate. People succeed best when they set themselves to doing what they love, and finding out what you love and beginning to get good at doing it are at the heart of a college education. Good teachers matter because they can surprise you out of your complacency and into new views of yourself and the world. Or — and often this is just as valuable — they can induce you to struggle to affirm intelligently what you’ve previously believed in indolent, unconsidered ways.
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“I’m glad you were home,” William tells Lester Bangs after they’ve had their rock heart-to-heart on the telephone. Bangs assures him: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”
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