Sunday, December 18, 2011

On interests and teaching

Gary Gutting:

Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting. It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have. Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

What Is College For? (New York Times)

comments: 2

Elaine said...

Wonderfully expressed!

normann said...

Exactly! I did not have to make Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars interesting for my miraculous second semester Latin class, where I felt I earned my pay for teaching college, rather than, say, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th grade. It never got better...