Let me start by presenting my credentials. I have had the ongoing privilege of teaching at the undergrad and graduate levels for over a decade now. Before this experience, I also had the opportunity of teaching schoolchildren for a good five years. Add to it all those years when I was on the receiving end, so to speak, and I like to think that I have a fair idea what I am talking about.
There is no dearth of those who consider teaching an easy job. The fact of the matter is, while teaching badly may be the easiest thing in the world, teaching well is a different matter altogether. Â Genuine experts of any area of study are hard to come by, but those who really know how to communicate their knowledge to others are probably even rarer. To become an extraordinary teacher, one has to overcome numerous challenges that are bound to come his way.
Some of those challenges are fairly simple to negotiate, provided one is conscious of them; others are such that require much more than simple awareness of them. Luckily, most of these can be sorted out reasonably well with experience and a continual resolve to improve. Greatness (in any field) is rightly reserved for a select few, but anyone can aspire to and succeed in becoming an effective teacher.
The topic is arguably of more import today than it was at any time in history. The internet and the social media having become what they have, we now have innumerable folks teaching everything under the sun from mathematics to logic, from literature to law, from science to history and from philosophy to sociology; and the list of these educators keeps growing by the day. Many traditional as well as on-line educators have content of very high quality to offer. It would not be unfair, however, to remark that the way most of them communicate it leaves a lot to be desired.
The first issue for the teacher concerns his or her body language. To a large extent, the body language is a function of competence in one’s field of interest, but that is not all there is to it. There are the inevitable issues with movement (too much or too little) and voice (speaking too quickly or too slowly) or problems with finding the right pitch and tone. Experience has a way of sooner or later helping teachers relax and focus on their content. Looking at oneself teaching (on video, or in mock-sessions in front of a mirror) usually accelerates progress on this front.
A major pitfall for the instructor is the urge to make his lecture perfect and definitive. While perfection is no doubt a noble goal, the teacher must keep reminding himself that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The hell that this particular intention generally leads to is wordiness owing to the desire of cramming the lecture with too much detail. While it is never advisable to shortchange the student by sacrificing on accuracy in favour of simplicity, it must be realized that some nuances can only be understood once the student has thought through the subject matter for himself, and is at the stage where those finer difficulties have arisen for him. Taking frequent detours and pre-empting questions and answering them prematurely for the student not only dilutes the delivery of the major thrust of the lecture but are also detrimental to the long-term growth of the student.
Teachers, sooner or later, get cured of this desire of packing too much information when they realize that they do not have infinite time at their disposal and that they must trust the serious student to dive to depths that cannot be covered in the limited time available to them in class. They must, provided they use the old-fashioned board and chalk (or marker) for teaching. All bets are off however, if they use the PowerPoint instead.
Arguably the greatest bane of education is the dull lecture where the students wish they were dead or at Point Nemo. When a considerable portion of pupils is yawning or struggling to barely keep awake, it is usually nature’s way of telling the teacher that the proceedings need to be spiced up a bit. Thanks to the social media, the human attention span is currently at its lowest ebb in all history. Now it is by no means implied here that an interesting lecture will eliminate all sleepers, any more than an absorbing book can be expected to ensure, in and of itself, that no reader will toss it away unfinished. The point here is that if the inevitable is bound to happen (as it sure is in many cases) let it not be because the instructor had failed the task of making his lecture interesting. A necessary (sadly not sufficient) condition for an interesting lecture is that the instructor enjoys delivering it. While the ideal is to make the contents themselves captivating, there are undeniable limits to that (depending on the subject matter). The instructor should therefore not consider the employment of comic relief as something beneath his dignity or that of his class; because it is not.
What makes the situation tricky for the teacher is that the use of comic relief can easily be taken to unhealthy extremes. There are seasoned instructors who are guilty of grossly overdoing it. For where the challenge for a novice speaker is how to fill up the time allotted to him, the experienced presenter is usually faced with the exact opposite difficulty: Namely, picking and choosing from a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of amusing stories and titbits, what to use and withholding all the rest. In fact, the more experienced the teacher, the harder it is to avoid this trap. For with his experience, too much of such material is at hand, and therefore the temptation to share it all is too strong to resist for most. Succumbing to this temptation (and it happens way too frequently) takes away significantly from the focus, and therefore the quality, of the talk.
This need for focus may appear to be at odds with the importance of making the lecture absorbing (which was stressed a moment ago); but it is certainly not. A lecture is a performance, and like all acts, wit and spontaneity are crucial ingredients for its success. But the spontaneity that is called for is the one that is inside the confines of a script or four corners of the scope of the lecture. A totally adlib, unscripted type of performance may be enjoyable for many in the audience, but rarely can it be a good lecture. Even if on any given day it happens to be a good presentation by chance, there is no way (without there being a method to the madness) that it can be repeated. This is why focus and structure are so crucial. A lecture, then, must be as enjoyable as it can be made ensuring the delivery of its contents, but not anymore. Something easier said than done, but well worth keep trying!
