Get Started Teaching Philosophy

Ok, you're teaching philosophy. You know what you want to teach. But how do you achieve your goals? The simple answer, I think, is through strategy. Practically, teaching philosophy is just like making widgets or waging war: it can be analyzed and optimized. Moreover, teaching philosophy can benefit from the basic principles of good strateg.

So, I adapted a few principles from Sun Tzu's Art of War and B. H. Liddell Hart's book on military Strategy to the classroom. I generally just replaced "enemy" and "war" with "students" and "teaching" respectively. Don't get me wrong -- the students are obviously not the enemy -- but the resulting strategic principles have been astoundingly successful in the classroom.

1. Know your students. This may be the most important, and the most often neglected. You can't make progress, or learn from your mistakes, if you don't know the precise effect of your actions. Plot grade distributions, track progress, get feedback -- do whatever it takes to provide yourself with a detailed record of your successes and your failures.
2. Adjust your means to your ends. Teach ambitiously, but always face the facts. Students may unexpectedly turn out to lack an essential skill, and class time may be cut unexpectedly short. Always be flexible, and be willing to reset your teaching goals to accomodate your means.
3. Keep your teaching goals at the forefront, even while being flexible. There are many ways to teach a subject, which should be explored. But getting side-tracked or stuck at a dead-end may hurt your chances of achieving this goal.
4. Surprise your students. The psychological dislocation that surprise induces is absolutely invaluable to effective teaching. Surprise simultaneously garners attention, stimulates students to think, and improves long-term memory recall after class is over.
5. Choose the path of least resistence -- as long as it still leads you to your goals. The clean and simple way to get a message across always trumps the sophisticated and complex one. (This maxim can be very difficult for philosophers.)
6. Teach in a way that targets multiple objectives. If you fall short of achieving one, you may still achieve another, and thus still make progress towards your goals. Teach a difficult text that involves a few practical skills. Even if you don't nail the former, at least you'll still achieve the latter.
7. Don't teach an unreceptive class "head on." On sunny Friday afternoons, there may be a barrier between you and the students. You can break this down, but not by plowing directly into the lesson plan. Circumnavigate: ask them to think through a puzzle, or discuss a funny question, or do anything that might make them more receptive. Once they're engaged, you can more effectively draw them into the lesson.
8. Don't repeat a teaching tactic that has once failed. Give your tactic an all-out try -- but if it doesn't work, go back to the drawing board. It can be tempting to repeat what you just explained, but your students will benefit more from a new way of looking at the material.
   

Enjoy!

Saving Mathematics

The despicable state of K-12 mathematics in the US has been summarized in one charming, witty, furious article by Paul Lockhart. That's Lockhart the mathematician-turned-gradeschool-teacher, not Lockhart the astronaut. He currently teaches at New York's prestigious Saint Ann's School. Here's the article (it's well worth the 30-minutes it takes to read):

PDF (or alternatively PDF.)
Much of Lockhart's effort goes into cataloging what we all woefully remember: how math, as taught in most K-12 schools, is ugly and tedious. This is an absurd state of affairs. The practice of mathematicians is both artistic and refreshing. Something's gone wrong. And Lockhart's got a some great ideas about how to fix it:

what about the real story? The one about mankind’s struggle with the problem of measuring curves; about Eudoxus and Archimedes and the method of exhaustion; about the transcendence of pi? Which is more interesting— measuring the rough dimensions of a circular piece of graph paper, using a formula that someone handed you without explanation (and made you memorize and practice over and over) or hearing the story of one of the most beautiful, fascinating problems, and one of the most brilliant and powerful ideas in human history? We’re killing people’s interest in circles for god’s sake! (p.9)

It's always interesting to hear how different math-lovers manage to overcome their arid early math education. In my case, it was a book. My friend Patrick suggested it to me in my first year of college; it was Richard Courant's classic "What Is Mathematics?" and it was like reading about a completely new subject.

There are many books of this kind. The goal is not to batter you with formalism, but to help you develop the imagination and the curiosity and the discovery that makes mathematics so beautifully enjoyable. I remember my first experience with Courant's book like a breath of fresh air. And I've always wondered: why on earth wasn't math like that in school?

I think it can be. But as Lockhart laments, it's much more demanding to teach in this way. On the other hand, he assures us, it's much more rewarding as well. Here's hoping Lockhart's ideas take off.