I’ve had lots of great teachers in my 72 years. My whole first three grades were nothing but good teachers who got me off to a great start, then there was kind of a desert until high school, when my world history teacher left a lasting impression. I also had good English teachers.
One such, who I suppose sort of contributes to my definition of greatness in a teacher, was a brave soul who designed, got approved, and taught an African-American literature course in a public high school in a very conservative mid-sized town in a red state in the year of the Woolworth’s sit-in and the shooting of two students on an HBCU campus 3.5 miles away. She was young, tiny, pregnant, and puking every morning and still pulled that off. We never were allowed to know, of course, but looking back I am betting that she received threats. Ugly threats. She did it anyway.
Then there was kind of another desert until my junior year in college, when I had Ken Kaufman for a statistics course. Dry, right? Well you might say so, but. Ken departed from standard pedagogy to try something that was pretty revolutionary at the time, a sort of self-paced, self-reinforcing program contained not in a textbook but in a stack of paperback modules, and I did well–spectacularly well, not to put too fine a point on it–in a math course for the first time in my life. I fell in love with statistics that semester and I still am. I also fell in love with self-directed, life-long learning. It was in Ken’s class that it dawned on me that I could always learn, in or out of a classroom.
(It did not hurt that I met my husband in that course, but that’s another story for another day.)
Ken also shared with us, when he returned our first quizzes, how he maintained a test bank on 3×5 cards (this was the ’70s, mind) and how he ran quality assurance checks on his exams-using the statistics he was teaching us. I thought that was heckin’ magic. I still use his methods, although of course it’s all computerized now. And I’m the only professor I know who does, even among people in my department who are our resident experts in testing. So I guess it must be kinda quirky, but it works for my classes. And Ken’s transparency and willingness to admit when he’d goofed (e.g., by dropping dud items) is still a model for me.
I’ve had teachers who were great in their lives outside the classroom: One was in the French resistance, another worked for the Nuremburg trials court. I even had one who’d ferried bombers for the WASPS in WWII. I’ve had some genius-level teachers, too, including the monk who led a course in some esoteric Buddhist philosophy on line, early in the pandemic. That man is probably the most brilliant I’ve ever encountered.
But the fellow who actually inspired me to teach was one of my first professors in my second round of grad school. John taught a two-trimester psychopathology course, and he taught it like no one else I’ve ever studied under. In the first place, we had no textbook. Instead, he’d spent countless hours scouring the professional journals identifying primary sources on everything he wanted to cover in the course, and had Kinko’s copy them all into these gihugic three-ring binders (again, before you could just give a person a link). It’s one of the worst reading loads in a course that I’ve ever encountered, but it was worth every hour of the grind because I learned in a way that I probably never would otherwise how to read, interpret, and apply original research in my clinical practice. It made the lit review for my thesis a breeze. And John’s hard work was a model of excellence in teaching.
But perhaps more importantly, John was passionate. I remember thinking, watching him one day, that this was performance art: He was physically in motion the entire time, like an actor on a stage. He was all over the room, speaking to each of us individually at least once in every class meeting. And then, at some point, I thought, That looks like fun. So when I got out of school and needed paying work to keep body and soul together until I could build up my practice, I decided to give teaching a whirl. I sent blind resumes out to every school campus in the metro area and, as they say, the rest is history.
I hope that I bring Ken’s willingness to go out on a pedagogical limb once in a while, if I come across some new method that will help my students learn. Over the years I’ve experimented with transparency, ungrading, specs grading, the flipped classroom, and more. I’ve worked to be more inclusive and more accessible.
I hope that I bring Mrs. Joyner’s courage to my work. That I’m not afraid to advocate for justice as it relates to individual, family, and community mental health. That I’m not afraid to advocate for fairness within the profession and in the academy. That when the science is unpopular politically, I’ll teach it anyway: Full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes.
I hope that I bring John’s passion and energy to my work. I put a lot of hours into my courses! I also hope that I am as competent. He used to tap his skull and say, “Database, database, database” as he exhorted us to learn as much as we could. It’s PKM now, but the principle stands: I read and think and study and file away as much knowledge as I can. You never know when you are going to need a fact or theory or procedure, and in clinical work having the right information at your fingertips can mean the difference between life and death for you or your client. I try to impress this on all of my students, regardless of their major. For some, like engineers and nursing students and cops, it can also mean the difference between life and death for somebody. And if you’ve cheated or lazed your way through your courses, you can’t just stop and Google it in an emergency! Chat GPT is not going to walk you through, for example, the suicide protocol when your patient threatens.
I don’t think I’m great, mind. But this is what I’m aiming for every day–which oughta at least keep me from being spectacularly not great. Or so I hope.
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