“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.”
Plutarch
Teaching is a relationship.
Teaching is a relationship, foremost, that should be relational (centering the human element with compassion) rather than being merely transactional (instilling learning outcomes).
This is the guiding principle that I keep at the forefront of my teaching. I seek to humanize the students and the classroom; I work to resist bureaucratizing them.*
* “The impact of McDonaldization [bureaucratic standardization of the university] is clear… Both students and faculty members are put off by the school’s factory-like atmosphere. They may feel like automatons processed by the bureaucracy and computers… In other words, education in such settings can be a dehumanizing experience… Students may feel like little more than objects into which knowledge is poured as they move along an information-providing and degree-granting educational assembly-line.”
George Ritzer
“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.'”
Toni Morrison
