Growing up in a single-parent household, my mother played a large part in my upbringing. She taught grades 4-6 for twelve years in the Cincinnati school system before resigning to raise me. My father died when I was five, and mom decided to make a go of the small hobby farm we had started and to raise my brother and me on her own.
I recall conversations with my mom, always the consummate teacher, more as lessons or lectures, unlike the kinds of discussions my friends had with their parents. And education played a significant role in our lives: mom was a teacher, dad was a teacher, maternal grandmother was a teacher, I ultimately married a teacher. I can still hear her saying, “Louie, teachers are born, not made.” From a very young age, I understood and accepted this as fact. Either you could teach, or you couldn’t – there was no middle ground.
As my career unfolded, her words continued to ring true to me. Mine was a winding path to teaching, but I found my initial teaching experience in grad school successful and rewarding. Why not? I was a born teacher. I was genetically disposed. As is often the case, I overlooked some of my background or training that led me to this point. In fact, by my early teens, I’d gotten over my fear of speaking in front of a group by daily hawking the fresh produce from our family farm six days a week at open-air markets. The quicker we sold out, the faster we got home. I did this for ten years. I regularly tutored other students ten plus hours a week in college and worked in our computer center, where I instructed patrons on how to use Multi-Mate and Lotus 1-2-3. And of course, I got certified to teach high school mathematics, with a semester of student teaching, before even teaching my first college-level math class.
Fast forward to 2014, when I first heard about something called the growth mindset. As we now know, a growth mindset “means that you believe your intelligence and talents can be developed over time. A fixed mindset means that you believe intelligence is fixed—so if you’re not good at something, you might believe you’ll never be good at it” (Smith, 2020). I often hear people say, “I just can’t do math” – a very fixed-mindset approach. As a mathematician, I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I have made a career of helping students realize that with effort, perseverance, and the proper support, they actually can do math.
But wasn’t my childhood belief of teachers being born, not made, an example of embracing a fixed mindset? Wasn’t I a natural-born teacher, like mom said? Of course not! While I did not achieve the 10,000-hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, I did have a rich array of life experiences that prepared me well for my first college-level teaching experience in 1993. The fact that I was a white male who projected well did not hurt either.
All of this came into clearer focus for me after reading McMurtrie’s Chronicle article, “The damaging myth of the natural teacher“. In it, she explains how some instructors seem “like natural instructors.” These instructors have “it” – brilliance, charisma, empathy – while other, lesser instructors don’t. They can hold students’ attention with engaging, maybe even entertaining, presentations. While participants of such presentations feel like they understood and learned a lot, studies show that such entertaining presentations do little for student learning. I can confirm this from experience. I have given very entertaining lectures about the different sizes of infinity that fully engaged my audience to the point of an emotional response. But when I tested them a week later, they retained very little. Just because you perceive someone as a great instructor, doesn’t mean their performances will lead to student learning.
Now I break up my entertaining lectures: I get students talking with one another, struggling with the material. Do we cover as much material? No. Does it seem as fun as before? No. But do my students learn and retain more by actively working with the material? Yes.
As noted in McMurtrie’s article, “The mark of a good teacher … isn’t being liked in the moment. It isn’t charm or brilliance or even empathy. It comes about with practice and research, and it’s ultimately about giving students the tools, the space, and the guidance they need to learn — even when they are no longer in your classroom.”
Sorry, mom. While you were right on more occasions than I can count (the stove is hot, that’s going to make you sick, she’s not the one..), on this one, you were wrong. Good teachers are not born; the act of teaching requires constant reflection and engagement to move our students beyond where we found them.
Upside
My students demonstratively have a better understanding of the material.
Downside
My classes aren’t as entertaining.
Still learning from my (misstakes) mistakes…