/lit/ - Literature

THE INSTRUCTOR

I
The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognizes his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.
The lecturer's first problem is to have enough words to fill forty or sixty minutes. The professor is paid for his time, his results are almost impossible to estimate. The man who really knows can tell all that is transmissible in a very few words.

II

No teacher has ever failed from ignorance.
Teachers fail because they cannot 'handle the class'. Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

III

You can prove nothing by analogy. The analogy is either range-finding or fumble. Written down as a lurch toward proof, or at worst elaborated in that aim, it leads mainly to useless argument, BUT a man whose wit teems with analogies will often 'twig' that something is wrong long before he knows why.

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· The inexperienced teacher, fearing his own ignorance, is afraid to admit it.

· If the teacher is slow of wit, he may well be terrified by students whose minds move more quickly than his own, but he would be better advised to use the lively pupil for scout work, to exploit the quicker eye or subtler ear as look-out or listening post.

· There is no man who knows so much about, let us say, a passage between lines 100 to 200 of the sixth book of the Odyssey that he can't learn something by re-reading it WITH his students, not merely TO his students.

· I believe the ideal teacher would approach any master piece that he was presenting to his class almost as if he had never seen it before.

>>7017185

If you think it is of value, can't you demonstrate its value?

Anyway, my 2 cents:

I am college student (not studying literature) but I enjoyed (bits of) E Unibus Pluram (bits because I haven't read all of it, I just liked the style or mode of articulation)

I also liked 'Agenbite of Outwit' http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art6.htm
Completely different style.

I also liked Pierre Bourdieu (picrelated)