Conference quark::mennotes

    I never understood why teaching was considered a woman's job. Other
    than the fact that it got that way once and that that made it a self 
    perpetuating thing. Wasn't teaching once primarily done by religious
    groups mostly by and for men? I believe that women being the primary
    teachers is both the cause and result of this being a matriarchal
    society. In a patriarchal society the education of the young,
    especially of young males, would be considered far too important a job
    to be left for women. :-)

    Teaching interests me because sharing knowledge is fun. So is helping 
    people to try and do new things. Besides I love to talk. :-)

    I tried teaching 7th and 8th graders once. It was very frustrating
    because they really didn't want to be there. It was a computer class
    and they didn't want to learn about computers. They just wanted to play
    computer games. I think getting students to see the value in what is
    being taught is the hardest thing. That's why I want to teach at a
    level where students pick their courses. If they're in class it's
    because they wanted to be there. Of course once they're their there is
    some responsibility for the teacher to keep the interest level up.

    The best subjects to teach are those that interest the teacher. That
    enthusiasm can be contagious. Lack of enthusiasm is also contagious. 
    I believe that if my COBOL teacher hadn't been so anti COBOL I would
    have learned it better and appreciated it more. 

    You know you're a good teacher when the students stay awake in class
    and ask for you for other classes. If the students develop an interest
    in what you are teaching and actually use it you've been a success.

    		Alfred

    I was a teacher for a vocational school. I taught computer
    repair. Most of the students paid big $$$ to be there so they
    had more then just the normal motivation. When they didn't
    understand something they would take the time to see me in
    private. It was very rewarding and it was also great to
    see them graduate and get jobs. 

    re .0

>    It seems that note 65 on "Job Changes" has illuminated the fact that many
>    Men would/do choose Pedagogy...  This is interesting as Teaching has 
>    traditionally been a Woman's occupation (at least in the lower levels).

    Teaching may be _thought of_ as "women's work" but in reality I have
    not found that to be the case.  



>    I would like this topic to be a discussion of Men in the Teaching 
>    Profession...  What is it about Teaching that motivates you?  

    That of having an impact of "greater than myself".  In otherwords
    if I alone utilize that which I know, then the contribution is a 
    unit of 1.  However, if buy teaching what I know to others, then
    my contribution becomes many times greater than 1.

    >How can/do  you apply "Teacher" attributes in your present occupation?  

    As a System Support Specialist, I "teach" every day.  I have to be
    able to explain things to customers with mostly no visual or other
    aid other than just verbal explanation.

    >What do you suppose would be your major successes/frustrations as a 
    >Teacher?  

    Major frustration would be a class that I could not hold their
    attention and did not want to learn what I was teaching.  Where
    I would spend a major amount of time just keeping order in the
    class.  Ie junior high or high school.

    >What do you consider the "best" subjects to teach, 

    Math and Computers.  They are a fixed finite entity when compared
    to say literature in which there may or may not be a "right" answer.

    >and, what subjects should  be taught that presently are not?  

    Actually I think we try to cram too much into school these days
    especially at the elementary and junior high levels.  Should stick
    to the basics first.

    >How will you know if you have become  a "good" Teacher, etc...

    I would be able to tell if the students were learning anything or
    if they were just "getting by".

Anything I know that you don't, I love to teach.

Some teaching experiences I can think of:

When Rubik's cube first came out, I told John Hallyburton in MR1 that I was
going to write a paper about how to solve it.  This was before I even knew how
to get all 6 sides the same color myself.  I did write a paper.

Then I taught my cousin Wendy, who was 9 years old at the time, how to solve it.
After she learned, we had races, each with a randomly scrambled cube.  She became
unbeatable.  This felt like both a defeat and a victory for me simultaneously.



Another teaching experience is origami, which is Japanese paper-folding.  My mother
bought me some books when I was about 6.  She helped me until the last model
in the book, which was the crane, and she couldn't figure out the step where
you make the kite-shape and then open up the paper in the elongated diamond.
The picture in the book looked mystifiing.

I finally figured it out, and I've been making origami figures in boring classes
and meetings ever since (starting with Sunday school, where I filled up one of
those hinge-top desks with paper cranes until the teacher came over and humiliated
me in front of the class by opening the desk and yelling at me).

Anyway, I love to teach origami now at parties.  I can show you cranes, boats,
water balloons, tables, candy baskets, not to mention 20-faceted globes made from
12 or 30 pieces of paper.

I like to teach math too.  I've done some tutoring.

/Eric

    If you want examples of men in the teaching professon, consider
    Socrates and his pupil Plato.
    
    -- Mike

    I was thinking about the question of things that aren't taught that
    should be. I teach a course in decision making as a volunteer in the
    local house of correction. The students have good motivation to be
    there as it counts towards "good behavior" on their records. Most
    also realize that they wound up in prison because they made bad choices
    without really thinking about what they were doing. I think we should
    make a deliberate effort to teach kids how to make decisions. As it
    is most of them just react or allow others to make decisions.

    		Alfred

    There is a saying, "those who can't do, teach." Where did that come
    from ? 

     Jim

    re .7, bored students?
    
    Lorna
    

    	Most of the older universities did not permit entry to women for
    most of their existence. The teachers were required to belong to
    monastic orders, which sometimes included a vow of celibacy.
    
    	This was reflected in the lower levels of education too, and it was
    unusual for a woman to be taught to read.
    
    	Schools for girls only started to become accepted as normal around
    1650. One school I went to was founded about then, with its companion 
    girls school two miles away. The two schools were still there, more or
    less on their original sites, and still segregated when I attended.
    
    	You can't have women teachers when women are not educated, and
    women have only been educated in Europe for about the last 300 years.
    The fact that the higher levels of education were still only available
    to men meant that even in the girls schools many of the teachers would
    be male. An aunt of mine was one of the first women to be admitted to
    Oxford University.

    Teaching is tougher than it looks.  Over the years I've done my fair
    share of presenting workshops and stuff at places like DECUS, but
    they've always been fairly short, maybe half a day tops.  I've done
    them long enough now to know I'm good at them, but even so I wasn't
    really prepared for giving a full five day course.  Doing it for a
    living must be a nightmare.
    
    I'm a Pathworks specialist in a group which sort of specialises in the
    ad hoc/emergency requests that no-one else wants to or can handle.  It
    was therefore no surprise to me to be asked to go to Brussels to give
    the Pathworks system management course with practically no warning. 
    They had eight customers, no instructor, and they'd already cashed the
    cheques.
    
    I've been around the product(s) since it was just DECnet-DOS and the
    course material was all there (I thought), so I printed out the
    instructor's notes and drove down.  Fortunately I was at an Edu
    facility so their system manager had already set up the equipment for
    me - and it worked.  Full credit there.  I didn't have to set up
    anything.
    
    I nearly killed myself that week.  There is nothing worse than an
    instructor who sits up the front and reads the same notes the students
    have in front of them, and I was determined to be interesting.  The
    course material turned out to be in bad need of revision, but I was
    able to explain all the bits that were wrong or out of date, as well as
    add all the bits that were missing but which I thought important.  At
    the same time, just trying to keep the classroom alive for a whole day,
    let alone five, is awesome.  You quickly use up your standard repetoire
    of jokes, and by the first afternoon you have to improvise.
    
    Just to make life interesting, Brussels is a primarily French-speaking
    city that's slap bang in Flemish-speaking country, so the class was a
    linguistic mix, which is why the course needed to be done in English.
    
    At one end of the scale was a young chap not long out of university who
    clearly saw me as some kind of professorial type and who therefore hung
    on my every word (including at lunch), as if at the end of the week I
    was going to grade him and not the other way around.
    
    At the other end was a government bureaucrat who refused to say a word
    the whole week, arrived late and left early every day (at 4 o'clock he
    just picked up his briefcase and walked out), and who, according to
    those sitting on either side of him, played Minesweeper the entire
    time.  To tell you the truth I didn't give him an evaluation form to
    fill out at the end of the week.  He (fortunately?) left early.
    
    In between I had the two guys from the railways who wanted me to
    redesign their Belgium-wide network and show them how to setup a
    client-server SQL/rdb environment, and the million and one other
    questions which are sort of but not absolutely related to Pathworks,
    and by the end of the week I was glad to go home.
    
    Getting the evaluation forms done was tough, too.  Theoretically they
    are anonymous but in a small class like that it's easy to see who puts
    the forms down when.  I'd poured out five years of hard earned
    experience to them that week, in the process I think I at least doubled
    the amount of information that the course materials presented, and yet
    on the 'Instructor was knowledgeable' question, the only one that really
    mattered to me personally, two or three settled on an 'agree' instead
    of 'strongly agree'.  Geez!  There's no pleasing some people.  But at
    least no-one rated the overall experience as less than 'good'.
    
    I'm glad I've done it, and I may even do it again sometime.  But I'd
    never do it for a living.

    	I've probably taught about two weeks per year on average for the
    (nearly 20 years) time I have been in DEC. With adequate time for
    preparation, never teaching the same course twice (well hardly ever),
    and most of it internal, I have rather enjoyed it.
    
    	The first course I taught in DEC was a nightmare. I had been with
    the company for two weeks in software support when they discovered they
    had a customer course that needed teaching (OS/8), and no instructor. I
    had one week to prepare to teach a one week course, with *no* existing
    materials, and I had never taught before in my life. Fortunately (or
    unfortunately) I knew the operating system backwards. What could go
    wrong?
    
    1) I knew the subject too well. By the end of the second day I had
    finished with device driver writing and was moving on to how to do
    unsupported things with the file system, when I noticed some rather
    blank looks in front of me. Some of the students had never used a
    computer before. Since I had never taught before I had no idea what
    material I needed to prepare, what rate to teach the course, or even
    how to plan a rate for teaching the course. On Wednesday morning I
    started again with Monday morning's material and took it slower.
    
    2) Very mixed audience. There were two Checkoslovaks, and I never
    discovered whether they spoke any English. There was one person who
    worked as a hardware instructor for PDP-8s for Cable and Wireless, so
    he was quite happy about the device driver part. He helped by
    criticising my teaching techniques. Another person owned
    his own company and had just bought a computer, and he didn't see why
    his employees should benefit from DEC course credits (he offered me a
    job at the end of the course). At the back of the classroom was a girl
    from the training department who was sitting in so she would be able to
    teach future courses. Her hobby was winning beauty contests, it was
    high summer, and the era of the shortest mini-skirts, and as the
    instructor, I was the only person in the class facing her. You could
    see the frustration on the faces of the other students.

Re.11    So, was she or wasn't she ?

    Re .7
    
    "He who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches."
    
    			- George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"

    
    	I started my career as an Instructor in a School where various
    	course's were offered in the Computers. 
    
    	After the first week I thought I had throat cancer......and I also
    	seriousely thought of quitting smoking,......it was only  later I 
    	realised that I had never talked so much in a week, in my whole
    	life !!!!
    
    	It was a great experience....no doubt. Whenever I needed to learn
    	somthing new my manager would urge me to conduct a full time course
    	on the topic.....and naturally I learned. It was a harrowing
    	experience somtimes but all said and done I learned a lot and also 
    	enjoyed the job a great deal.
    
    	It was only after a year of teaching day in and day out....that I
    	suddenly realised that I was kind of repeating the same ol
    	stuff....again and again !!! At times even the Jokes would be
    	repeated...;-)). I kind of burned out so suddenly that all I could
    	do was - quit the job.
    
    	But all said and done, for an entry into the world of computers, I
    	learned a lot and certainly I learned how to deal with a bunch of
    	20 guys in a room especially when you dont know how to spend the
    	next 2 hours...:-<< It taught me how to communicate with people,
    	and that experience I feel is very necessary for any one right out
    	of university.
    
    Ankur

     Very informative responses in this topic...

 .0> This is interesting as Teaching has traditionally been a Woman's 
     occupation (at least in the lower levels).

 .3> Teaching may be _thought of_ as "women's work" but in reality I have
 .3> not found that to be the case.  

 .9> You can't have women teachers when women are not educated, and
 .9> women have only been educated in Europe for about the last 300 years.
 
     Many thanks for setting the record straight...  When I went to school
     (K thru 8) most of _my_ teachers were women (they seemed like sweet little
     old ladies at the time) so I think you can understand where I was coming
     from in .0.  I never thought of teaching as "women's work" but you have
     to admit that many women gravitated to the profession even though the
     job had some restrictive rules for women (I seem to remember reading that
     at one time women teachers couldn't be married, etc).  At any rate, many
     men in this file expressed an interest in teaching so I wanted to explore
     this some more...

 .5> If you want examples of men in the teaching professon, consider
 .5> Socrates and his pupil Plato.

     Mike, I wonder if you might expound on this...  What subjects are more
     conducive to the "Socratic Method"?  Do you think Socrates would succeed
     as a public school teacher in this day?

     Alfred, what method do you use at the prison?

 .0> and, what subjects should be taught that presently are not?  

     I was pondering about the subject of Stewardship and feel this would be
     very useful at all education levels...  Suppose you were chartered to
     design a course about Stewardship - How would you go about this?

.13> "He who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches."
    
     Well Dick, why would George Bernard Shaw make such a statement?

RE:15
>.13> "He who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches."
    
>     Well Dick, why would George Bernard Shaw make such a statement?

     I'm not a Dick, but a Jim Richard.

    I don't know why Shaw made the statement. Maybe because there are many
    teachers that teach, but have no field experience ? They go right into
    teaching after graduation.

    Law professors come to mind.

    Jim

Set term/mode=heavy_sarcasm

Digital managers come to mind too but with a difference ... I doubt that 
they graduated ...:-)

- Bob

    Actually, you ought to take the context of the quote from Shaw.
    
    It comes out of the mouth of a character in that play who is, by all
    evidence on stage, a pompous, self-important twit.
    
    Daniel

    re .16, I've met one law professor in my life, my roommate's sister. 
    She strikes me as someone who could do just about anything she wanted
    to do.
    
    Lorna
    

    When my brother was an education major in college, he added a third
    line to saying, "Those who can, do; those who can't teach"; the third
    line went, "those who can't teach, teach teachers."
    
    -- Mike

    Thoe who can, do.
    Those who can't manage.
    Those who can't manage, manage managers.
    
    	- Plagiarized by Ed Fisher, 1978
    
    

    Those who can, do.
    Those who can't, teach.
    Those who can't do either, manage.
    
			- Author Unknown

    Has anyone read the book "To Sir With Love"
    
    We studied at school a couple of years ago. I think they also made a
    film.