Penn & Teller's Teller on How to Be an Effective Teacher - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Education, at its most engaging, is performance art.
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Teller, a former Latin teacher and the silent half of the magical partnership known as Penn & Teller
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The first job of a teacher is to make the student fall in love with the subject.
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the teacher has a duty to engage, to create romance that can transform apathy into interest, and, if a teacher does her job well, a sort of transference of enthusiasm from teacher to student takes place.
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“If you don’t have both astonishment and content, you have either a technical exercise or you have a lecture.”
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Teller’s educational philosophy is rooted in the philosopher A.N. Whitehead’s “rhythm of education,” a theory that asserts learning happens in three stages: romance, precision, and generalization.
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What I have, however, is delight. I get excited about things. That is at the root of what you want out of a teacher; a delight in what the subject is, in the operation. That’s what affects students.”
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It’s easy to disregard the entertainment of your students as pandering, but it’s not, Teller stressed, citing Frances Ferguson’s The Idea of a Theater: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective. “In the art that lasts, there’s always a balance: purpose that is action, passion that is feelings, and perception that is intellectual content. In Shakespeare, for example, there is always a level that is just action, showbiz. There is always a level that's strongly passionate, and there’s always a level that’s got intellectual content.”
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Learning, like magic, should make people uncomfortable, because neither are passive acts. Elaborating on the analogy, he continued, “Magic doesn’t wash over you like a gentle, reassuring lullaby. In magic, what you see comes into conflict with what you know, and that discomfort creates a kind of energy and a spark that is extremely exciting. That level of participation that magic brings from you by making you uncomfortable is a very good thing.”
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When I go outside at night and look up at the stars, the feeling that I get is not comfort. The feeling that I get is a kind of delicious discomfort at knowing that there is so much out there that I do not understand and the joy in recognizing that there is enormous mystery, which is not a comfortable thing. This, I think, is the principal gift of education.