Self-Introduction Part 3: Teacher

If, after 70 years, I had to select one word to describe myself, the word would be teacher. Of course, I think that we are all teachers in some sense of the word, but teaching has been, at least part of the time, my profession.

Only a small portion of the teaching that I have done was in the classroom. Indeed, what I was paid to do most of my life was to edit other people's writing. However, as an editor, I seem to have been perversely driven to make myself redundant. That is, I didn't want to just "fix" what other people wrote; I wanted to help writers well enough in the first place that they didn't need my service at all. Unless a change that I made was the correction of an obvious or technical error, I felt obliged to explain why I had made it and why I believed that it was an improvement.

That practice of explaining was partly a result of my apparently instinctive desire to teach and partly a defense mechanism. The people whose work I reviewed were usually educated professional writers. Since many thought that what they had written was "just fine," I was often obliged to explain why my version represented a stylistic improvement.

To some extent, I think that teaching is an inborn propensity that some people have more than others – or at least acquire very early in life. Good teachers have a strong urge to share what they know with others. That's not to be confused with the desire to convince other people to share our opinions – I think we all do that. It is more an irrepressible urge to impart knowledge and to help others to develop skills that we think are useful. It can even be a desire to guide others toward an appreciation of those things that have enriched our lives – things such as art, literature, and music.

Some are more successful at teaching than others. (I won't presume to say how good I am at it; that is for others to judge.) Knowing something is not the same as being able to teach it, although knowledge is a prerequisite for teaching. We've all met people who are experts in their fields but cannot begin to explain what they know to anyone else. A computer wizard, for example, may be utterly inept at teaching a novice how to use a computer.

Increasingly, I believe that teaching is more than just passing on information. People can acquire rote knowledge on their own, although a tutor is useful in explaining the more complex concepts. What matters far more is showing people how to use this knowledge and how to think for themselves.

In my own field, for example, I feel that an ability to write clearly depends heavily on an ability to think clearly. One must, of course, first master the basics of grammar and sentence structure, but most of the problems with my students' writing is more a result of fuzzy thinking than of faulty grammar. Beyond the failure of the schools to teach the basics, a more important deficiency is the failure to teach students how to reason, analyze, and think logically – to perceive principles and connections of ideas. One doesn't learn that by rote, short-term memorization. However, that must be a topic for another entry.