Book Review: Never Work Harder than Your Students

I spotted Never Work Harder than Your Students, by Robyn Jackson, on a friend's bookshelf, but didn't have time to read much of it; took it out of the library; didn't have time to read much of it; and finally ordered a copy, which I am now quickly skating through.

First impressions.

The form of the book is self-helpy. It starts with a quiz; it has its own website; it occasionally breaks out with a term like "Master Teacher" that you sense the author is just waiting to trademark.

But:
The content of the book is great. Some of it is obvious but all of it is getting good ideas crackling.

So, so far, I recommend it.

(The title is misleading -- it's not a book about keeping teachers from working too hard; it's a grab bag of pedagogical insights.)

The Power of Knowing that You Know Something

One of the lessons I learned in my first year of teaching - fortunately before the end of the year - was that it's not enough for students to learn; they have to see clearly that they are learning; and for this purpose, it is not enough to give them ways to apply the new knowledge & skills; you have to really spell out for them here is what you have learned.

This morning, I saw an interesting illustration of the power of feeling that you do know something, in Oliver Sacks' account of one of my favorite stories of scientific discovery.

Dmitri Mendeleev had been playing with arranging and rearranging cards representing the various known elements, trying to discern the underlying pattern; one night he fell asleep and dreamed the Periodic Table, more or less as we know it.

Here is Sacks' footnote to the story:

This, at least, is the accepted myth, and one that was later promulgated by Mendeleev himself, somewhat as Kekule was to describe his own discovery of the benzene ring years later, as the result of a dream of snakes biting their own tails. But if one looks at the actual table that Mendeleev sketched, one can see that it is full of transpositions, crossings-out, and calculations in the margins. It shows, in the most graphic way, the creative struggle for understanding which was going on in his mind. Mendeleev did not wake from his dream with all the answers in place but, more interestingly, perhaps, woke with a sense of revelation,  so that within hours he was able to solve many of the questions that had occupied him for years.

(Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten. New York: Random House, Inc, 2001. p. 198)

Thanks, Tiff

This random memory of good teaching just surfaced.

Once when I was in about 4th grade, we were playing baseball, and I became completely overwhelmed because people were stealing bases and I didn't have a clue what was going on. I think I was fielding second base.

The P.E. teacher, Tiffany (but the cool kids called her Tiff), noticed that I was upset, halted the game, came over, asked what was wrong, and explained what it means to steal a base.

"Do you understand?" she asked.

"No," I said.

She repeated her explanation.

"Do you understand?" she asked.

"No," I said.

She repeated her explanation.

"Do you understand?" she asked.

And this time, I did.

Triumph! Relief! Joy! The game went on and now I understood it.

...

I once got roundly scolded by an administrator for repeating an explanation to a student. "If she didn't understand, you should explain it a different way," she said.

Which is true; so I try to do that now.

But sometimes all you need is someone who will halt a game for you and say the same thing three times.

I don't know where Tiff is now but I still appreciate that she did that.
Thanks, Tiff.