Learning Through Stories: Who Was Your Most Inspiring Teacher?
Today begins the third round of the Learning Through Stories project on the Brilliant Blog. (See here and here for stories from the first and second rounds.) A lot of scientific research—and our own experience—demonstrates that we understand and remember material best when it’s presented to us as a narrative, or when we tell our own story about it. So, once a week, I invite you to share your stories of where and when and how you learned something in particular. And I’ll be asking you to do one additional, perhaps challenging thing that is nevertheless the key to the exercise: to draw out a generalizable lesson from your story that could apply to the learning of other things, and could be used by people other than yourself.
The question this week is: “Who was your most inspiring teacher, and what enduring lesson did you learn from him or her?” Write your answer below, and try to include as many details about when, where, and how it happened, as well as what lesson you can draw from it. I’ll start:
My most inspiring teacher was my high school English teacher, Mrs. Goppelt. Mrs. Goppelt loved reading, loved writing, and her passion was infectious. I was already a confirmed bookworm and writing came easily to me, so I could have coasted through her class—but Mrs. Goppelt didn’t let me. Once, I remember, I met with her in her office and she handed my essay back to me with a stern expression. “You write very well, Annie,” she said. So far, so good. “But sometimes your writing is more style than substance. I know you can dig deeper.” I left feeling unfairly criticized. I knew the essay was good—good enough, anyway. But after a while I came to realize that by not letting me get away with good-enough, Mrs. Goppelt was doing me an enormous favor. I did dig deeper, and I produced work for her that I was really proud of—essays that actually cost me something in terms of effort and struggle, and were the more valuable to me for that. I still think about Mrs. Goppelt and her challenge to dig deeper—especially when things come easily. That’s when it matters.
OK, your turn: Who was your most inspiring teacher?
Again, a high school English teacher. Her name was Miss Childs, and alone in all my teachers, she saw that stories lit my mind up. She loaned me books, some of which I didn’t enjoy, and when I told her that, she taught me that disagreement and negative reactions aren’t things that signal a block of time you’ve wasted. She read a few pieces of my creative writing that were rubbish, and she made it clear in her marking what she thought had gone wrong. From her, I started learning that writing “well” (correct grammar, no typos) wasn’t enough – it had to be *about* something, and that something could be structured in really interesting ways that added value to the delivery of the piece.She started to teach me about storytelling – and that’s now what I’m doing for a living (the teaching it and the employing it).
And when I think back, what strikes me now is how little time she spent in doing this, because I was part of a class of 20+ and I was just another student. Sometimes inspiration is a matter of fleeting moments that just spark off you the right way, and leave something smoking and crackling within you for years, like a tire-fire, without you really being fully aware of it…
My most inspiring teacher was my senior year religion teacher in high school, Tim Breen. I had always attended Catholic school, from K-12, and Catholicism was all I really knew. I guess from all perspectives, I had really lived a rather sheltered life. I knew very little of other faiths besides the most basic and superficial information. That all changed thanks to my “World Religions” course my senior year.
For the first time, I was exposed to other religions on a deeper level – what they believed, why, connections to Christianity, problems facing their culture/people/faith. The way that he taught us, through current events, stories of his time in the military and tangential material that really tied it all together really inspired me to open my eyes to the world around me. It made me want to learn more. So when I went to college, I took as many interesting and diverse religious studies courses I could. I even left Catholicism for a while to find my own place in faith and religion, eventually coming back with a greater love and desire for my faith tradition. But I would never have had the confidence to do so without the enlightenment I had during my senior year, which continued to be nourished by my great college theology professor Dr. Mark Hadley.
Both of those men are the best reasons for why I am a theology teacher today.
I’m from a middle class family and with a lot of effort my parents had to pay expensive private schools because the public school in Brazil lacks in quality. My parents used to say “this is the only thing no one can take away from you: your Education and what you can do with it”. So even when money ran short, my parents always invested in their children’s Education. When I was in college, an 18-year-old, my father decided to enroll me in an English school because he believed it would be important in my future. First class and I didn’t know even how to say “hello”. My teacher, Carla Andrade, comes into the classroom, introduces herself and brings a video tape. The video showed the United States and all about it: parks, universities, museums, Americans and the American way of life, and all those things that can make teenagers remain quiet for some minutes. After the video is shown, she says “well, the best student of the year will be granted a trip to the U.S, with all expenses paid, to study English and stay with an American host family. The winner will visit parks, museums, universities, high-schools, NASA, etc. However, to win this, the student needs to receive A+ in all subjects, have no absence and have perfect behavior. Good luck, class!” To a “broke” teenager, that sounded like a dream. I left school saying “this trip is mine”. I was in the “Basic Level”. I had a lot to do. After college I used to study 5 hours, answering all exercises and reading all I could. But I couldn’t really see good results. I was only developing vocabulary but not really fluency. My teacher saw me in the library, surrounded by dictionaries and said “It’s your first year here, and you are competing with students who have been studying for years. I see you want this trip very much so here is what you have to do. Ask yourself why English is important to be learned. Why it will make a difference in your life? Keep studying the language but start learning more about the English-speaking countries. You will see their culture hidden behind the words and that is so fun. For example, the words ‘profit’ and ‘proficiency’ are ‘twin sisters’. For anglo-saxons, profit comes from talent, effort, skills and progress – and that is what proficiency is all about. Then you can understand better the American Constitution, the country’s laws, economy and democracy – and even the gold medals in the Olympic Games. Open your mind to go beyond the language, Sheila”. During the ceremony in the end of the year, the contestants were all sitting in the front row, our families there, friends, the whole school. The principal comes on stage and announces the winner: “she was a surprise to us all. We used to joke while talking in the teacher’s room that this girl must have great ears – for what she hears, she never forgets. Ladies and gentleman, this year the winner is ‘Sheila Maria Prates’. Congratulations, Sheila”. I had my mom jumping on me, my friends, everybody. I went to Mrs. Andrade, held her hand and went on stage with her to receive the award. I said “Mrs. Abreu said I learn fast because I have great ears. No offense, but it’s not about my ears. It’s about my will. A will fed by my dear teacher Carla. Today is the happiest day of my life and I owe you this, teacher.” After my trip, I was invited to work for my school (my first job). I haven’t stopped learning and working since then…
Alice Lombardo Maher, writing on my Facebook page:
The person who changed the direction of my life was my high school math teacher, Ms. Dzierzynski. Until that time most of my teachers had been elderly nuns, most of whom taught facts without understanding the essence of what they were teaching. That’s what I thought education was. Hamlet was written by Shakespeare. Hamlet saw a ghost. Hamlet hesitated. In contrast, Ms D was a young, hip, guitar-playing Barnard graduate, and she taught in a way I had never experienced before. She taught math not from rules and equations, but from theoretical foundations. She derived the equations from something deeper. It was something that I had the capacity to understand; something I discovered that I loved. She taught our class in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades, and it was because of her that I was able to confront my parents and teachers and inform them that I wanted to go to Barnard rather than one of the small Catholic colleges they assumed I would attend. I majored in math and went on the medical school and a career in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. I sometimes wonder what my life had been like if I had never encountered Ms D. One of those nuns on a bus…?
Hi all
I wanted to share the most amazing teacher in the world or to me anyway….. She is a teacher that understands most troubles a student goes through as a teenager. She was my Biology teacher in gr 10. She was awesome at explaining the work… i actually understood the work. I am very gratefull for this amazing teacher that got brought into my life and inspired me to become who I am. I have had other teachers inspire me, yes, but not as much as Miss C. Olivier. I will always remember her as the best teacher I had.
Mam, if you end up reading this, please know that you are an amazing teacher and you must carry on with your wonderful work.
Thanks mam it is highly appreciated.
Nicole M.
I will continue the trend of picking high school English teachers.
In 11th grade, I was required to take a year-long course with the unglamorous, unpromising name of “Term Paper.” Each student was required to read the collected works of an author as well as secondary sources en route to ultimately writing a 25-page research paper.
Mr. Joe Grover was my teacher, and he had designed the course in such a way that it was just about impossible to avoid learning the proper way of completing every step in the process of writing a substantial, credible, high-quality term paper.
We spent a good week on every element: doing library research, writing an outline, creating an antithesis/thesis, and so on. Every single step was introduced with the rules as well as great examples, and then we had to apply it to our own research.
Mr. Grover was not “inspirational” in the Dead Poets Society sense. He was low key. He required frequent one-on-one meetings with each of us, and he gave us detailed critiques every step of the way.
One typical interaction: I was writing my term paper on Oscar Wilde, and I told Mr. Grover that I wanted to call my paper “Words on Plays on Words.”
“Very clever,” he said. “But does that title accurately foreshadow the content of the paper?”
“Not exactly,” I said, “But…”
“Too bad, then,” he said. “You’ll have to find another one.”
By the end of that year, I had been given the gift of deep confidence in my ability to take any topic and write about it. The lesson? Deep, meaningful “sticky” learning is all about breaking down complex processes into bite-sized “micro-goals” and pecking away at them over months and months. Almost anything can be learned if it is framed with intelligent design and taught with diligence, care, and high standards.
My story is about my violin teacher. I originally published this at Steve Silberman’s blog (http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/10/05/whats-the-most-important-lesson-you-learned-from-a-teacher/) when he asked a similar question. You can find this and some other stories there; and/or the same story below, with some links and a pic of the annotated musical score in question, at http://j.mp/njFrc9.
But enough context. Here’s the story:
What Malone Said
I started studying the violin in my 30s, working with a warm, intense teacher named Malone. After 5 years he put Bach’s D minor partita in front of me. “We’ll start with the Allemande,” he said. He put the music on the stand and talked me through the first movement, pencilling in bowings and fingerings, occasionally demonstrating how to get through some rhythmic puzzle, and sent me home. I practiced hard all week and came in ready to play about half the first page.
He stopped me on the second note. “Please put down the violin,” he said. I did.
“You’re skipping through that first D. I know it’s just a fucking little sixteenth note, but you have to play the whole thing. I don’t even mean the time. You’re actually giving it enough time. But you’re playing over it instead of through it. You have to play right through the center of it. It’s a leading note, but it’s not just a step into the room. It is the room, and you have to put us there. Play it. Play through every single note in the piece.”
I started to reach for the violin. He held up a hand.
“Wait,” he said. “This is Bach. And Bach, more than any other music, and these pieces, more than any other Bach, is music complete. This doesn’t just mean it’s beautiful. This means you can play this music all your life, even just this Allemande, and no matter what you do, it will expose you. It will expose everything you are and everything you’re not. It will expose everything you can do and everything you can’t. It will expose everything you’ve mastered and everything you’re scared of. And I don’t mean just about the violin. I mean about everything. It’ll show all that today and it’ll show all that when you play it again in 10 years. And people who know music, who’ve seen you play it both times, they will see you play it and know who you were and who you’ve become.
“There is nothing you can do about this. Or actually there is only one thing you can do about it. And that’s to play the fucking music. To not play scared, even if you’re terrified. To not rush. To not short anything. Inhabit this thing. Play it full.”
He took a deep breath, let it out slow, and gave me the tiniest hint of a smile. “Okay,” he said, and nodded at my violin. “Play.”