You are assuming some sort of really special training is required for teaching. Bad assumption.

– Rando on Twitter who bills himself as a 'business owner'

How much training did I have to be a teacher? That's a complicated question, believe it or not.

When I was an undergraduate at university, I started out with the idea of studying medicine. This plan was changed at the end of my second year, when I started suffering from migraines in all my math and science subjects except biology. My brain was trying to tell me something. After some soul wrestling, I decided that, as much as I wanted to be a helpful member of society, I really should go with what I was good at. What I was good at was languages and communication. So I switched to my first love, German, and picked up all the stray languages I could. No more headaches, thank you.

However, this meant, inevitably, that I would end up teaching, which was something I wasn't sure I'd be good at. A lot of my fellow undergraduate German students were headed for public school teaching. They got teaching certificates along with their degrees. But it was trade-off: half their coursework was teaching-related. This left them with far less time to, well, learn the language.

I asked one about it. She laughed. 'It's okay. We're just going to spend the rest of our lives teaching Baby-Deutsch, anyway.' I nodded, uncertain whether this was a good thing. When we got finished, the teachers went off to teach Baby Deutsch, and the university sent me to Bonn to read medieval texts.

When I got back, I still had coursework to do to finish my master's degree. In exchange for all this free tuition, I was expected to teach. Here's where it got interesting.

The 'Baby-Deutsch' teachers got something like 24 credits' worth of pedagogical instruction, plus a semester of practicum. What did I get?

A three-day seminar with the PhD candidates. I am not making this up.

After three days of practising things like 'substitution drills', we were turned loose on an unsuspecting student body. I felt I could have used a bit more preparation. If I'd had it, I might not have muffed the first class so badly. I was so overprepared for German for Reading that I got through five whole chapters in 45 minutes.

I kept asking if they had any questions, you see, and they all shook their heads. I didn't realise they were in shock. After class, a very sweet freshman, clutching her books, approached me (warily, I thought) and asked, 'Excuse me, are we always going to go this fast? I don't think I can keep up.'

I stopped, in the grip of epiphany. I apologised to her and everyone else. 'I'm sorry. I will slow down. I was very nervous, because this was my first-ever class.'

She looked at me with wide eyes. 'Oh! Nobody could tell.'

I had four city blocks to walk to my next class. I was still laughing when I walked in the building. The next hour went much better. I may not have been an experienced teacher, but I was an experienced learner.

When I say I only had a three-day seminar to prepare to teach, that is not quite true. I had been learning how to teach since I was six years old. If you'd asked me which teachers I had were good at their jobs, and which should have picked a different profession, I could have given you chapter-and-verse on each and every one. I watched them closely. I studied the good ones. I remembered what they did that made learning easier.

The second-grade teacher who organised little field trips around the neighbourhood. We made buttermilk by shaking milk in a Mason jar. We drove a few blocks to watch the process at the bread factory (you wouldn't call it a bakery if you'd seen that bread). We went to the penal farm and petted the animals and played with the inmates and, no, she didn't tell us what 'penal' meant and no, not one parent complained that she took a bunch of seven-year-olds to associate with convicted criminals. She taught us to fingerpaint and spatterpaint and play rhythm instruments (I got the xylophone, since I could read music). Thank you, Mrs Todd. You taught me more than you knew.

The fourth-grade teacher who bought a maths game with her own money to help us master multiplication and division. I believe she spent her own money on the prizes, too – bite-sized candy bars. I used to pass out my extra ones on the way home – yes, believe it or not, I was good at arithmetic, once upon a time. The trauma of algebra ruined all that. And yes, I blame the teacher. He had a crush on the Spanish teacher that limited his effectiveness in the classroom.

The various strategies used by successful teachers went into my mental inventory. Pace Marc Antony, the good was not interred with their bones, but lived on in my memory, to be brought up and adapted as the need arose. In years to come, Greek kindergartners and German airmen, businessmen of all ages, scholars, refugees, college students, and even a rabbi came to benefit from my accumulated observations of creative teaching methods. And, after all, if practice doesn't exactly make perfect in an inexact science, it certainly makes better. So thank you, on behalf of the students of three countries and the world's diaspora, to the fine teachers who taught me by showing me how to teach.

Now, to that 'business owner' who thinks he's qualified to teach his own kids: show me your bona fides. Tell us what you learned about teaching from the people who taught you. Prove you didn't just mean, 'There's nothing to teaching but indoctrinating the kids with your own prejudices, and I'd rather they got mine than a stranger's.'

You don't need a certificate, but you do need a skill set. You need listening skills. You need to be adaptable. You need strategies and tactics – especially when teaching German insurance agents¹. You need to be a lifelong learner yourself. And you need something I'll bet that 'business owner' hasn't got: humility.

Because the world will keep showing you what you still have to learn.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

14.10.24 Front Page

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