Genius Freak

I overheard a teacher offering this advice to a student-teacher the other day: "As long as you stay a chapter ahead of the kids, that's good enough." I know that there are some things we do in our lives for which just getting them done is good enough. Dusting, grocery shopping, paying bills, putting out the garbage, walking the dog. Of course everybody's list is different. But some things should never be on the "good enough" list.  Teaching is one of them.

I know that no matter what you teach, or where, or whom, relationship is the foundation of all teaching and learning. Learning to read means figuring out the relationships between shapes and sounds; learning language, any language,  means figuring out the relationship between sounds and meanings. I teach English. In my classroom, among other things, we examine the relationships between  between words and ideas. Between words in a sentence. Between one idea and another. Between authors and their works. Between their works and our own lives. Every academic discipline revolves around the study of relationships. In math, we express relationships in numerical terms. In physics we examine cause and effect relationships. In art we explore our human relationship with beauty, and color, and light. Learning happens when we encode new ideas and experiences in our brain by them putting them in relationships with other things already in our brain. But no matter what subject we t...