When I taught a civil rights class at the University of Maryland Law School, I would do an exercise with my students. I'd write 'civil rights' on the board and ask them to tell me what immediately came to mind.
I think it's important how I come across to my students. I want them to see how professional women dress.
I learned quickly that if the student's perception is that you're not listening to them, and not understanding them, they discredit you.
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Every year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls.
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
I'd never taken an SAT prep course. They were for weaker students.
Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.
Whatever happens to science in schools, there's something peculiar going on if students don't see it as creative.
You know how to tell if the teacher is hung over? Movie Day.
Students never think it can be the teacher's fault and so I thought I was stupid. I was frustrated and would come home and cry because I couldn't do it. Then we got a new teacher who made math accessible. That made all the difference and I learned that it's how you present it that makes it scary or friendly.
The first task in teaching is to bring to consciousness what the students already believe by virtue of their personal experiences about themselves and society.
I don't think any of my teachers know much about football. Pretty much every teacher I have is foreign, and UCLA's a brilliant mix of minds from all over the world.
If you're funny and working in education, I think the perception is that you're either inspirational or awful. So which was I? I suppose that depends on who you talk to.
I learned from teaching. If you are perceived by the student to be belittling them or purely criticizing them without offering up words of encouragement and support, they shut down and discredit you.
It's actually a tribute to the quality of economics teaching that they have persuaded so many generations of students to believe in so much that seems so counter to what the world is like. Many of the things that I'm going to describe make so much more common sense than these notions that seem counter to what one's eyes see every day.
The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it's to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.
There is a kind of belief among my students that things that are true are interesting. But most things that are true are not interesting. Four pages describing how I got up and brushed my teeth in the morning would kill you.
Students shy away from Maths, but in reality Maths is the best friend of man.
