Tag Archives: teaching

Getting Students to Grow by Taking Risks

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , ,

An art gallery would have to turn most paintings to the wall if we insist on applying standards of good character to their artists.

Over the years we have seen many films that at least momentarily explore the dynamics of teachers and students in class sessions.  But I have never seen one that struck so many chords of recognition as happens early in Todd Field’s film, Tár (2022).  Field’s elaborate study of a complicated modern conductor pulls its audiences in many directions. Cate Blanchett’s maestra is a classical music conductor and a polymath superstar. Only later does her dishonesty toward friends and other musicians come into focus. But we first see her as a master-teacher.

We can set aside the complications of the story to the simpler example of ten minutes of a master class in conducting with a group of Juilliard students. Her pedagogical style in mostly one of interrogation. She wants her students to defend their all-too settled choices so early in their careers.

This rigidity shows up in the character of one conducting student, Max, who she sees as using a casually applied insularity to shut off what she believes he must be exploring. And scene feels about right. Getting students to really care about the subject they are ostensibly committed to was, I found, a constant and frustrating challenge as a teacher. I applaud this woman’s full-throated repudiation of her student’s indifference.

“The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.”

The set up is simple. Max has chosen an atonal fragment of modern music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir to conduct.  It is a real piece of new music that is outside the usual western traditions. And Tár is not a fan. She stops his conducting of it and gently interrogates Max about why he likes the dissonant piece. Among other things, it doesn’t really need a conductor. In her words, it may be a car without a motor. How about something a bit more conventional, she suggests, something like a movement from a Bach cantata. But Max frowns.  He is barely able to whisper his response that he has no interest in a “cisgender white male misogynist,” which she takes as an all-too-easy excuse for avoiding perhaps the single most important figure in western music.  It is hard to conceive of a conservatory student so easily dismissing Bach, who–to this day–has united most virtuoso musicians in total admiration for his prodigious output. That would include many rockers like The Beatles and Sting, song-writers, jazz musicians and music theorists. Put simply, Bach significantly advanced the possibilities of musical invention for most working in the western tradition.

Does his domestic arrangements have any role in whether to learn from him?  The equivalent in communication theory is getting students to try an author who upends simple the simple notion of passing information from A to B. To take the risk of discovering a more nuanced view requires reading, thinking out loud, and, yes, challenging a teacher to defend his or her enthusiasm.

Sitting next to Max at a piano, she demonstrates how the opening of a simple Bach piece turns into a series of consecutive and evocative progressions inviting resolution. She and most of the musical world think of them as essential inventions. But Max clearly isn’t interested. And, in exasperation, she turns on him as someone who may be trading on the prestige of Juilliard rather than using it as a resource for discovery.  This is bracing stuff, well outside the musical cliches in most films. But at this point she is no longer teaching effectively, but performing a dramatic character that will let us witness Max’s humiliation. That’s not a good outcome. I love the lesson as a commentary on opening minds. But it can’t end with a student feeling like they are on the outside of the process. See the riveting scene below.

Luckily, Max is not a stand-in for every student. But Field seems to have presented the piece as a warning that being a slave to identity politics is going to leave any student with a very incomplete education. In an art gallery we would have to turn most paintings to the wall if we insist on a character test for its producers.

As I watched this clip I wondered about my own dislike of most of Richard Wagner’s music.  Like Max, I have revulsion for a composer who gave such evident pleasure Nazi leaders. Shouldn’t I also follow Tár and focus on the art?  My only defense is that the two align too closely for me. Wagner lived years before the rise of the Third Reich, but he displayed some of its worst tendencies, particularly its antisemitism; and both the Nazi’s and Wagner shared a love for a homegrown white super-mythology. Even so, I recognize the possibility that, like Max, my judgment is too narrow.

 

red bar

Teachers

Models, , , , , , , , ,

They made the boring interesting. They modeled confidence and competence. Mostly, their individual features of character—especially their forbearance—changed the course of lives. As a group they were simply wonderful.

 

 

 

 

 

The act of teaching is one of the most consequential of all communication functions. By the use of the term I mean more than its application to institutional settings.  All of us perform a teaching function from time to time: mentoring others, coaching, and explaining something we know well to someone who wants to know more. Even the choices we make can instruct.  While our influence may not always be apparent, our actions modeled to others give them reasons to learn or occasionally rebel.  But even cultivated rejection of an instructor’s ideas can be positive. Aristotle embraced the study of rhetoric, something his teacher mostly repudiated. To be sure, no one wants the nightmare of a music teacher like J.K. Simmons’ tyrant in the film Whiplash (2014).  For things musical we would probably all prefer someone like the engaging Antonio Pappano, the music director of London’s Royal Opera. His video discussion of Puccini’s Tosca is a model mini-lecture.

                             Times Higher Education

The subject of wonderful teachers came up recently when I asked some of my students to identify an instructor who was a significant influence. The specific subject came up in planning a debate on whether we lose too much by abandoning the classroom in favor of online courses. I was coaching the affirmative speakers, whose formal position was to defend instruction in real place and time. I suggested they provide a few sketches of individuals they had known who made a difference.  Presumably all of us have had moments when a teacher provided a pathway through a subject we had never known.  Interestingly, I got no response: a surprise given New Jersey’s reputation for excellence in many of its schools. Perhaps it’s in the nature of youth to miss what is outside a narrow calculus of personal interests and concerns. At that age many of us were too distracted to notice the gifted people we had been lucky to know.

As a profession, teaching is not a prestige profession. My best teachers—Dawn, Phillips, and others—barely created ripples of recognition beyond the influence of their students. The anonymity of their names belies their competence and abilities to evoke the imagination.  They made the boring interesting. They paid their students the honor of taking them seriously. Notably, their individual features of character—everything from how they spoke to how they how they offered guidance—changed the map of their students. As a group they were simply wonderful.

What many of us forget is that the temperment of a teacher matters.

Schools of education teach future teachers mostly on the premise that this form of communication is a process—and a bureaucratic one at that. There are lesson plans to learn, testing protocols to honor, human development sequences to master, and curriculum yardsticks to know. These benchmarks are needed because teaching younger students usually happens within a rigid structure of state and organizational mandates.  There’s a metric for everything, including how well Johnny should be reading in the fifth grade.

What so many of these strictures miss is that the temperament of an advocate/teacher probably counts for even more. What Aristotle observed about all forms of communicators—that character matters most—still seems valid.  This is more than noting that a teacher must be a virtuous person, though that’s partly what Aristotle meant. Teaching with the right qualities of temperament must embody a degree of passion for a subject being pressed upon the young. Teachers must believe that their subjects matter.  And somehow they must generate the same kind of conviction in a student.

I’ve been lucky to see seemingly stale subjects conjured into life mostly because the instructor performed their own fascination with them. In my case it happened in a Freshman course in elementary biology, a high school course in acting, and college classes devoted to politics and rhetorical theory. The last is surely the ultimate test. Is it possible to be awakened to the deep relevance of rhetorical theory?  I’m here to say it is and it was, when Trevor Melia patiently revealed a world we had never seen. His quiet probes eventually produced a cadre of academics around the country who now work to induce their own classroom transformations on unsuspecting undergrads.

You can probably reverse engineer your own interest in a subject back to a teacher that lit the fire of enthusiasum for a subject that has never died. If so, that piece of your life is their enduring legacy.