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
Wonderfully expressed!
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...
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