In reviewing my posts from the last couple of weeks, I realized that I’ve neglected to share my views on the role of teacher. Here’s what I said last year and I think I still believe this:

The Teacher
My thinking is that there really is only one role for teacher — to serve as a bridge between the learner and knowledge. There are other things that a person might do for/with a learner that, while part of the human relationship, are not part of teaching. While this may seem an unnecessary splitting of hairs, what I’m trying to accomplish here is a precise construction of Teacher.

Many of you have pointed out the various relationships between the person designated “teacher” and the person designated “student” and I have no argument with those characterizations. I would (and do) argue that these other relationships are not the relationship of “teacher to student” but confound our ability to clearly identify what the teacher does.

To illustrate, think of a cab driver. The role of cab driver is to drive you from one place to another for hire. That’s the role. Along the way, the cabbie may engage in conversation, out of a sense of “customer service” or boredom or whatever. He or she may offer you tips on what to do, where to go, or what to see while in town. They may provide information on local customs or upcoming events. All of these are good and interesting — even valuable — from the perspective of the person(s) in the back seat, but they are ancillary to the role of cab driver.

As I said in the post cited above, this may seem like unnecessary splitting of semantic hairs, but failing to do so confounds our basic understanding of the role of teacher.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 8:32 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.