1 | A Handful of Anecdotes about Elephants

“You’re Not Teaching Me”

In the days when I had an office and taught in a traditional campus-based university, a student once came to talk to me about one of my classes that he was taking. He was quite angry. I cannot recall the precise words that we exchanged, but the gist of our conversation was roughly as follows.

“You’re not teaching us anything,” he complained.

“But are you learning anything?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, tons. Actually, come to think of it, much more than I’ve learned on any other course till now. But you are not teaching me anything. I have to learn it all myself.”

I nodded as sagely as I could, trying to repress a smile.

He paused in thought for a moment, and then his face broke into a broad grin. “Ah ha!” he said. Those were his exact words.

I love to hear those words.

When Good Teachers Do Bad Things

I was once called upon to help a colleague prepare his pedagogical statement of relevance when he was nominated for a national teaching award. He had already written a lengthy draft statement describing his methods of and approaches to teaching that I read in advance of our first meeting. In my naive arrogance, I was shocked that anyone would consider nominating him for such a prestigious award. His statement was a litany of what I understood to be some of the worst instructivist teaching practices and pedagogies that I had ever seen. As I recall, it consisted of descriptions of his full-frontal lectures, flash tests designed as threats to the unprepared, ways of punishing those who failed to keep up, and a defense of the value of objective testing. It seemed to me to be awful, authoritarian, and controlling. I would have held it up as an exemplar of everything bad in learning design.

I was so wrong.

To my great surprise, none of this prevented him from being a brilliant teacher. In fact, the more I spoke with him and those affected by him, the more I realized that he was among the best teachers I had ever known. His students were enthusiastic and competent. The best and the worst were motivated and saw great improvements in both grades and attitudes during his courses. The majority loved him, and it was clear that he loved them. They went on to do well in their field. Many sought his help in obtaining graduate degrees. His teaching spilled way beyond the deliberately taught courses and into the broader community. He was an inspiration to his colleagues. By any measure, save what I believed to be the use of good pedagogical methods, he was at the top of the field. A brilliant, passionate, and caring teacher whose results, no matter how they were defined, and certainly by the criteria that I thought should matter, were stellar.

It was a humbling experience. He got the award.

No Teacher, No Problem

When I was studying for my O-Levels (at the time, a qualification taken by many schoolchildren in the United Kingdom, normally at the age of 16, that typically came at the end of a 2-year period of study), my mathematics teacher, a charismatic and amiable man who had been quite an inspirational teacher during our first year, became ill for most of the year leading up to the final exams. The school did its best to provide substitute teachers but, for the most part, failed. If we were lucky, then we might get a student teacher for a week or two who would attempt to mark our assignments. Much of the time, they were unable to answer our questions. Some of the time, no one turned up at all. Even when they did, we were usually left entirely to our own devices and told to follow the exercises in the textbook. So, we spent somewhere between a third and a half of our math course without any (apparent) teacher. At least, there was no one playing the didactic role, hardly anyone helping us to solve problems apart from ourselves.

To the surprise of many, the class broke all records for O-Level achievement that year by a remarkably large margin. We enjoyed ourselves too.

An Earth-Moving Learning Experience

I once attended an e-learning conference during which an earthquake took out all the power for a day. Although a few people gave up presenting completely, some soldiered on. Most discarded their carefully prepared PowerPoint slides and extemporized, turning their talks into conversations. It was actually a far better learning experience for most people than would have occurred had things gone as normal. The sympathetic camaraderie of the audience meant that a great deal of interesting conversation resulted, especially since the cancellations gave more time for discussion than normally would be available. Later presenters picked up ideas and approaches from those who spoke earlier, and by the end of the day the whole conference was buzzing in a way that might not have been possible had the earthquake not disrupted the proceedings. I was rather disappointed when the power came back on later that night, in time for my own presentation the next day. The rest of the conference was interesting but not nearly as thought provoking or engaging as it was that day.

One presenter, however, took a different tack. Although his audience consisted of perhaps 20 people—a good number for this particular multi-track conference—unfortunately he was scheduled into a lecture theatre designed to hold hundreds of delegates, with no windows and only dim emergency lighting. The audience was dispersed across the lecture theatre, and using his laptop computer on battery power the presenter held it up to the audience and gave the PowerPoint presentation that he had originally prepared. He was quiet spoken, and without a microphone—a necessity in such a large room—and with English as his second language it was hard to understand what he was saying. Only those with good eyesight in the front row could see anything on his laptop screen. He repeatedly had to turn his screen toward him so that he could remind himself what he was supposed to be talking about, illuminating his face with classic horror movie lighting. Everyone applauded sympathetically at the end, despite having learned virtually nothing of what he was trying to tell us. As a postscript, I was lucky enough to chat with him a few years later. His work was actually quite fascinating, and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Although what I learned had little to do with what the presenter hoped to teach me, this was a profound learning experience.

Boats That Teach

I am writing this on my old, rickety sailboat that (more or less) floats in a marina near my home. The boat has evolved over the past 30–40 years to embody—and to transmit—much of the learning of its previous owners. From the (repositioned) mainsheets, to the ingenious feeding of lines from fore to aft, to a self-steering device (which tends to steer the boat in circles—not all technologies work as intended), this boat captures the problems and solutions of its former owners, as well as its original builders, in countless ways. I have added some tweaks of my own over the years that I have owned it. Not only have all of us made it easier and safer to operate the boat, but also we have left concrete explanations of our learning, not in words but in changes that we have made to the boat itself.

My boat sits in a marina next to other sailboats, many of a similar vintage and size, which solve similar problems in different ways. Some embody solutions to problems that I hadn’t even realized were problems. I am constantly taught not just by my own boat but also by comparing it with those around me. The boats teach; the marina in which they are moored teaches.

My boat is surrounded not just by other boats but also by the people who sail in them. These people are a rich source of knowledge, drawn together by their shared interests and problems. Most of us have only a partial understanding of the art and science of sailing and boat maintenance. There is a rich and arcane vocabulary involved—gudgeons, pintles, and so on—that few of us know in its entirety, but we teach one another and, through repeated use, learn it ourselves. It is rare to spend more than a few minutes working on my boat (which I do far more often than sailing it) before someone passes by and offers some help or (sometimes welcome) advice. Whenever one of us figures out a solution to a problem, others learn from it. When I devised a makeshift contraption involving shackles taped to chimney-sweeping poles that I ran up the backstay in order to free a shackle that I had carelessly trapped at the top of my mast, there were cheers when I managed to pull it free again. Somebody came to shake my hand. We had all learned a new and useful trick.