At high noon on Tuesday May 29 my academic year officially ended as I completed my final lecture for the term at the Fromm Institute. Things wound down at the SF Conservatory several weeks earlier. It has been year 35 at SFCM, year 23 at UC Berkeley, and year 2 at Fromm. A few months from now I will launch years 36, 24, and 3; all three are signed and sealed, just waiting to be delivered.
Year's end is the academic equivalent of New Year's Day, an opportunity to think about events just passed and reflect on the future. With this turn of the wheel I'm intrigued by those qualities that distinguish truly good teachers from the merely competent or worse. The general opinion seems to be that it's a matter of talent, an alchemy, and as such ultimately resistant to rule-making or quantization. Overall I'm inclined to agree; just as you can't always put your finger precisely on what makes a particular performer special while another one with similar abilities fails to strike sparks, it isn't usually clear how one teacher can make magic while another one merely gets the job done, or yet another can't seem to move students from A to B. Superb teachers aren't all that common, but neither are they quite as rare as popular scuttlebutt would have it. Could they share at least some common attributes?
I spent a bit of time trolling the web for articles about good teachers and teaching. They weren't hard to find. At first I needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Learned articles from pompous experts were profoundly unhelpful, as might be expected. Probably the most boneheaded were advisory broadsides produced by university education departments. Adopt an approachable demeanor, intones one such guide. Oh, yeah? I reply. I wouldn't want to be within 100 feet of a teacher who needed to adopt an approachable demeanor. Looky here, bozo: approachability is a given, a fundamental DNA-level requirement. I would rephrase the advice as: if you aren't naturally approachable, forget about teaching as your profession.
Once I had dispensed with the balderdash, one overall characteristic came whooshing up from just about every article: Great teachers love teaching.
Could it really be that simple? It seems incomplete. After all, folks could absolutely adore teaching and totally suck at it. Then again, such people might be more in love with the idea of teaching rather than the real thing. They might be blinded by the image of themselves as teachers. I mentored a rapidly-failing young teacher with precisely that problem; he worked assiduously, produced tons of materials for his classes, prepared like crazy and gave an aura of absolute commitment. But a blast crater had opened up between him and his students. My first concern was to find out what was going so spectacularly wrong. That didn't take long. His classroom demeanor mixed up a deadly cocktail: he was waspish, snappish, impatient, inconsistent, and notably weak in the very skills he was teaching. I tried to show him how he himself was causing the alarming series of near-mutinies that were taking place on a regular basis. He was either incapable of seeing it, or resistant to my advice.
I think here of Florence Foster Jenkins, the wealthy New York society lady who sang recitals on a yearly basis, capping off her career with a 1944 Carnegie Hall appearance. She definitely loved singing. But musically and vocally she was a train wreck—off pitch, screechy, arhythmic. She was bad at a delectably entertaining level and remains a legend amongst connoisseurs of the truly awful. According to Stephen Temperley's play Souvenir, she began seeing through her own self-deception towards the end; that may have been dramatic license, but it underlines her seemingly inexplicable anesthesia to reality. Peter Quilter's play Glorious!, also about Jenkins, makes even more of her occasional bouts of self-doubt but also celebrates the happy comfort of delusion.
And that's just fine if you're a dotty society matron whose incompetence isn't hurting anybody. But not if you're a teacher, because bad teachers hurt people. So obviously there has to be more to it than just loving teaching. Let's try: Great teachers love teaching—all of it.
That "all of it" is a shorthand for a daunting list of qualities. Great teachers care for their students as people, they're devoted to their subjects, they are committed to improving themselves, they never stop fostering achievement and excellence, they know when to push and when to back off, they're willing to try new things and jettison failed experiments, they have a sense of humor about it all, they're always prepared, they are always aware of their potential for doing good or ill. Another attribute they share: they all make it look easy.
That's because at some level it is easy for the great teacher. That isn't to say that the best don't work at it: quite the opposite. They work a lot harder than their middling-level colleagues. But it is less about "work" per se than it is about willing commitment, about expecting the same level of achievement from themselves that they are asking of their students. A great teacher makes it all seem natural, almost spontaneous.
External evidence—evaluations, reviews, reputation, recommendations and referrals, awards, etc.—would indicate that I'm a first-rate teacher. More importantly, I consider myself to be such. But that doesn't mean that I'm deluded about my own shortcomings. I've evolved over the past three-plus decades. My development hasn't been linear; good times rub shoulders with bad times while they hobnob with plain old slogging-through-it-all times. I haven't always been happy as a teacher; I needed time to discover what I did best. Mistakes, lapses in judgment, lacks of perspective, overconfidence, insecurity, failed experiments, unfortunate habits: been there, done that, with no doubt plenty more to come. I feel like a bumbling nincompoop sometimes. Other times I notice that my pedagogical engine could use a minor tune-up, a tweak here, a nip 'n' tuck there. Other times yet I leave a classroom giving myself a mental high-five for a job well done. No matter what I remain indubitably a teacher. That's ingrained into my DNA and I think always was.
I still remember the visceral jolt of excitement that streaked through me when, as a ninth-grader, I stood at the board and tutored a fellow student through the mysteries of devoir. Writing on a chalkboard: how humdrum, how plain, how blah. Not for me. For me it was satori. The conceptual curtains parted for an instant and I knew. I had my calling. Before then I had held vague notions of becoming a concert pianist à la Arthur Rubinstein. Now my mental future-self homunculus abandoned the concert hall and took up residence on an idealized campus. Pianist became teacher-pianist, an alter ego rendered with crystal clarity, as if a camera had zoomed in on a previously blurred background figure. I never altogether lost that image, even if for a while the blinkered life of a piano major in a conservatory reduced it to flashes of peripheral vision. Eventually I unhyphenated my teacher-pianist homunculus and left the piano part to wither.
Amongst fine teachers the personal details vary, but I daresay something similar happened to all of us at some point. We walked through that doorway. It wasn't so much a conscious decision as it was a magnetic force. That handy tripartite division of job, career, calling makes perfect sense when thinking about teachers. Very few people ever take on teaching as a job—i.e., solely to make a living with no further commitment. Public-school teaching in particular doesn't pay doodley-squat, after all. A fair number of the middleground, however, take it on as a career. They are professional about it all, they are reliable and thorough, they hit all their marks, they account for all those median-achievement graphs. But the best amongst us take on teaching as a calling: irresistibly drawn to it, reveling in it, devoting our hearts to it. Challenging, sure. It can be tough, depressing, infuriating, frustrating, humiliating. But mostly it's joyous.