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10/05/2006: "Here’s a Test for You: How Young Were You When You Were First Able to Recognize a Teacher Who Couldn’t Teach?"

My own memory is that the skill was becoming well-entrenched by the fourth grade. I can go back through old report cards for confirmation. Classes or subjects in which I received the lowest grades were nearly always classes or subjects where I remember the teacher as being incompetent. It would be easy—and not out of the question—to suggest that the problem was mine (and my brain’s) and not the teacher’s. But after several decades of paying a kind of professional attention to teachers who can and who can’t teach, I won’t concede easily on this point: a sizable number of my teachers in grade school, junior high, high school, college and finally grad school were incompetent, and I could tell almost from the moment they first opened their mouths in my presence.

The worst were these:

• Almost every P.E. (physical education) teacher I ever had. Typically, they were coaches. I quickly learned they didn’t care whether I learned or achieved anything in their classes. I got A’s in golf at one school and A’s in basketball at another, at the first merely by submitting the required documentation and at the second, merely by enrolling and then demonstrating that I didn’t have the skills to compete at the level the teacher wanted to work with.

• The biology teacher who taught my high school sophomore science class. At the time I was thinking I’d be an architect and was taking a mechanical drawing class where a competent teacher was polishing my skills at lettering. I submitted a theme in biology written in the block-y lettering of a draftsman—and was forced by Ms. Autocrat to redo it in script. At that point, I knew I was dealing with a teacher who cared little about what I cared about, and everything about what she cared about. I did poorly in sophomore biology.

• My senior year in high school, a physics teacher who couldn’t fashion two consecutive coherent scientifically oriented thoughts. This was maddening when you thought you might be about to major in college in a scientifically oriented discipline. I got an F for the course. That year I was also president of my school’s chapter of the National Honor Society. In a panic, I went to the school principal to let him know that about half of honor society’s members had just flunked physics. When he said not to worry, I realized that even the principal knew this guy couldn’t teach.

• A buffoon—jerk, really—of a religion professor who taught my college class in Reformation History. My bad, for signing up for the course. Clue No. 1 that the guy was probably trouble was that his first two names were “Martin Luther.” Clue No. 2 was that he’d just returned from touring Germany and would be using his slides in his lectures. His opening lecture was utterly, totally incomprehensible, and so was his final one and every other one in between. I got the lowest grade of my college career in his class.

Such memories suddenly came bubbling to the surface after years of inactivity as I was reading a nicely researched and crafted work called Teaching with the brain in mind. It’s a soft cover, oversized work published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. The 2nd edition hasn’t been out long, and its author, Eric Jensen, a former teacher, prolific book author and apparently a brain scientist (he’s a member of the Society for Neuroscience), is keeping it current with new research findings.

As I read Jensen’s clearly phrased introduction to such topics as what the brain needs to learn (externally such things as support from peers and the right room temperature and internally, such things as engagement, repetition, input quantity, coherence, timing, error correction and emotional safety and support), I realized that at every level of my formal education, I would have wished for a teacher with an avid interest in brain topics. Ideally, each would have been an expert on how, among other brains, my own brain worked.

Such is asking a lot of all those brains who have earned teaching certificates and are drawing a teacher’s pay and who face the multiple demands made on today’s classroom instructor. But it’s not an impossible task. Reading Jensen’s 188-page work and taking it to heart and mind would be an excellent start, for there is no more important subject in all of education.

Jensen’s book is available here: Teaching With The Brain In Mind

Jensen can be reached through his wife, Diane, at diane@jlcbrain.com