Teaching - especially teaching adults - is, or should be, a process of learning. Sometimes a teacher learns content more deeply or fully; other times, they learn to express ideas or thoughts more clearly or accurately, or they may even learn to know humanity better through true encounters with their students and their students' needs. Then there's the more incidental learning due to hearing and reading about students' interests. (Virtually all the K-Pop I've listened to has been from students' homework-based recommendations. It's not my thing unless it's theirs.)
Here's a brief philosophy of teaching, particularly language teaching and more particularly writing skills teaching.
Premise #1 - Students learn better when they are personally interested in the subject.
Premise #2 -Teachers are paid and expected to help students learn something better, faster, or more comprehensively.
Premise #3 - Learning is relational (or social).
Based on these beliefs, I design my classes to let the students have maximum choice of content as well as some choice in curricular goals and hopefully a meaningful voice, even in a large class. This means that students often choose the topics of the lessons which we use to practice skills. It also means that they choose the topics which they will be writing about in their homework, and sometimes even for their exams. My role is to help them to learn the needed academic language and writing skills while they explore their chosen topics. In other words, they get to learn some of what interests them while learning what they are 'supposed to'. Naturally the details are different from class to class, but my guiding philosophy has held pretty consistent for about a decade now. It's an attempt to balance standardization and personalization; it's an attempt to give each learner a meaningful pathway to engagement and growth no matter their starting point; it's an attempt to lure each learner into joy in their learning.
All of this has a HUGE side benefit: students have a massive range of interests, which makes grading assignments far more enjoyable as a teacher! I consistently get to be a learner in my own classroom. This brings us to the Turkish Language and Literature students whom I've gotten to teach Critical Reading and Writing to for the last two years. They don't get a lot of classes in English, but most of them truly love literature. So, they introduce me to great books and make them sound fascinating. My students have helped to make books like Orwell's 1984 and Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brönte's Jane Eyre sound worth reading.
So, after a variety of promptings including from students, I have just completed Jane Eyre. I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially since my wife and one daughter read it at the same time, and we talked about it as we read. It has high-quality writing, unexpected plot twists, and so much vocabulary that was new to me. I have no doubt that I'll re-read it. Not being as good at writing book reviews as some of my students, I will leave you with a few quotes instead of a synopsis of the book. These samples are ones that I feel can be snatched out of context without losing most of their meaning; there are many other powerful sections which did not seem as meaningful extracted from their place.
As Jane must make a difficult choice filled with moral implications...
"Still indomitable was the reply—“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.” (pp. 221-222).
As Jane becomes a teacher...
"I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born. My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I shall find some happiness in discharging that office. Much enjoyment I do not expect in the life opening before me: yet it will, doubtless, if I regulate my mind, and exert my powers as I ought, yield me enough to live on from day to day.
... I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings; I know them to be wrong—that is a great step gained; I shall strive to overcome them. To-morrow, I trust, I shall get the better of them partially; and in a few weeks, perhaps, they will be quite subdued. In a few months, it is possible, the happiness of seeing progress, and a change for the better in my scholars may substitute gratification for disgust." (p. 253).
Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive. (p. 262).
Before quitting, I'd add a couple caveats. Without knowing what Brönte herself believed, I'd mention that her openly religious characters often talk in dualistic, 'escapist' terms that suggest that this world is not valuable and that only the next world is worth living for. The Bible would not agree. Secondly, it seems unfortunate that the only two characters who are non-European in the text are the two chosen to be (or expected to become) insane, with one of them being evil and the other weak in character. This typing and the dialogue surrounding it should offend us today even if it was standard two hundred years ago.
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