20140806.0608

It should be obvious that I am doing better about being up when I ought to be. For much of the time away, I had been letting myself sleep in; I feel that it hampered me unduly. The problem is at least in the process of being corrected.

As I am sitting and typing, to change the subject completely, I notice that the way I am doing so is not at all what my own poor instructors taught me to do. (I call them poor not necessarily because they were only marginally competent in their jobs, but because they had the profound misfortune of having me in their classes before old age mellowed me out--and they had rooms full of others very much like me. I shudder to think of the situation from the front of the classroom.) I am working more or less with two fingers on each hand, with the occasional strike from my ring and pinky fingers and thumbs, rather than typing with all ten digits. For all that, though, I still type nearly eighty words per minute. (I test regularly to be sure. I also ten-key at something approaching 8000 keystrokes per hour. Valuable job skills.

I am forced to consider how much else I do otherwise than my teachers taught, and so I am forced also to consider how much my own students do otherwise than I have taught them--and how much they *will* do otherwise. And that threatens, for a moment, to make me doubt that I or any of my colleagues do anything that approaches any good in the world. As teaching is often understood, we do not if our students go away from what we gave them. (Some will asset that, as teaching is often understood, we *never* do any good in the world. Note the attacks on educational systems in general.) But teaching as it is often understood is not actually teaching, or at least is far from being the whole of it. For teaching is often regarded as being the dissemination of information alone, something I follow others in addressing here as being an inaccurate view. It is far more; in its better , forms, it is the promotion of habits of mind and the willingness to deploy those habits in situations in which learner find themselves later on. That is, teaching is supposed to equip students to think along certain paths later--and it will of course be the case that someone following a path from a point other than its earlier beginning will each a different end. If I walk a mile north and a mile west, I will end in a different place leaving from Sherwood Cottage than I will from Bedfordside Garden. So it is with teaching; my colleagues and I teach from our own perspectives and understanding, as cannot be avoided and should not, and we lay out the paths w use to find new knowledge. Our students start from where their own roads cross ours, so even if they move forward from us, they will reach different places from us.

That is as it ought to be, for it is only in that that we find new things, and we need them. What we have had so far has not really worked.