More thoughts on Teaching Philosophy

Being labeled an anti-academic was something of a breakthrough for me. I had been trying to define my teaching philosophy by understanding where it lined up with the pedagogy of the authors I've been reading, trying to think of myself as a socio-culturalist or an expressivist, when in reality I just really hate the academic-based teaching style.

All of learning is an organic process, and it's bizarre that we try to force learning to fit a system, rather than adapting the system to take advantage of our natural processes. From what I've seen, there are three basic things that people care about when it comes to learning anything- having fun, completing objectives, and their own egos. Therefore, any lesson system should be based around gratifying and exploiting these systems.

Readings should be based around something that the students find familiar and interesting, and the focus should be on immersing them through sheer volume of consumption. It becomes possible for students to simply coast through readings that never increase in difficulty, subject or complexity, but I believe that most people will naturally gravitate towards more advanced works and texts as they exhaust the limited readings and options. There should still be a minimum standard of quality for their readings, but trying to guide them down a specific path seems faulty.

In-class discussion of reading processes would focus on introducing the students to new ways of examining the possible paths and notions of reading interpretations, without trying to place a value on them. This system is also necessary due to the lack of a unified set of reading assignments that my ideology emphasizes.

On the writing side of things, I would try to make the assignments engaging by starting off expressivist, letting people's egos go wild. This also creates a playground scenario, where people feel more inspired to engage with the text and expand their writing. This would progress into various objective-focused writings, where the focus wasn't necessarily on producing a full essay or assignment, but instead on exploring a system or concept in a comfortable way.

Basically, I guess my teaching philosophy is based on the idea that you don't have to teach somebody how to have sex, you just have to stick them in a room and provide the right toys for them to play with, and they'll do the work for you.