Personal reflections on teaching and softball, no substantive allegations

CHAPTER 2 MZ i CG: i Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. —John Dewey Teaching is a serious issue. Teachers matter. Or at least they should mat- ter. But we have the sense that it is the job of the teacher to tell us stuff. Students expect it and teachers do it. Often, teachers get criticized if they do anything else. And, this is pretty much the beginning and the end of the problem with teaching. We force teachers to teach wrong. Iam beyond the age where I have little kids that I have to teach how to walk and talk. But when I did, I don’t remember preparing any lesson plans. In a cognitive process-based model of education, all teaching looks like the teaching you do when you teach your children to walk and talk. Lately I have been personally interested in being taught. This is because at the age of 55 I started to play softball in an old guys’ softball league in Florida. I discovered I wasn’t really very good. This was a bit surprising since I had played in the university softball leagues while I was a professor and had stopped playing only in my 40s. I wasn’t a bad player then. There hadn’t been that long a hiatus. And, I was playing against people a good deal older than myself since I am rather young as recent Florida transplants go. I used to be a good hitter and I wasn’t now. The reason was easy enough to understand. In the university leagues they play fast pitch. A batter has a second or so to decide about swinging. It is all instinct. At least it was after having played for 40 some odd years. But, in Florida, old guys play slow pitch. The pitcher throws the ball in a high looping arc and it is a strike if it lands on the plate. Quite a different experience from trying to hit a ball that is zinging by your head. Should be easier, no? Not for me. It took a bit of thinking to figure out why. 15 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023761