Real Life Tao - Different Paths

Trey Smith

In the 1960s, I came across a little book entitled Master Teachers and the Art of Teaching. This unpretentious little book, written by John E. Colman of St. John’s University, not only enlightened me as a young university professor but proved to be invaluable. In it, about a dozen different teaching methods are described along with some information about the master teachers who designed them. Each of these methods was used successfully to teach some subjects to some students. None was used successfully to teach all subjects to all students. Throughout my teaching career, I found opportunities to utilize many of these methods when the right situations arose. The lesson I learned from this little book is that there is no one teaching method that works for teaching all subjects to all students. Finding the right method for the students at hand is at best an art, never a science, and is never easy.

Few people understand this. In fact, teacher training suppresses it. Teaching methods are taught to prospective teachers as fixed, reliable procedures that never fail when, in reality, they rarely succeed.
~ from Fraudulent Educational Reform in America by John Kozy ~

Increasingly, we live in a cookie cutter world. This mentality can be seen in the so-called educational reforms being promoted throughout the country. Built upon the methodology of standardized testing, the aim appears to be NOT about encouraging critical thinking; it's more about spitting out obedient drones!

As with all things in this life, there is no one singular path to anywhere or anything. Each of us will ply different paths at different times in our lives. A successful and harmonious path today may be anything but tomorrow. Like a tree that bends in the wind, we must be flexible enough to switch paths, when needed.

Even a person like me -- someone who follows rather rigid routines -- understands that what worked one time may not work next time. While I tend to cling to well-worn paths, I sometimes must veer off onto new paths, when the situation warrants it!

Standardized testing treats the educational process as a one-size-fits-all proposition. It stresses rote memorization and specific ways of looking at the wide variables of life. In most cases, it discourages students from engaging in thoughtful and careful decision-making. And it pushes teachers to employ a very limited number of teaching strategies.

This post is part of a series. For an introduction, go here.