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Here’s the problem, teaching requires the creation of community and that is nearly impossible to do with technology. Yes, there are Facebook groups and support groups and recovery groups who have formed bonds but here’s the thing, students need community, they need guidance AND they need to learn something new, challenging and often without an immediate reward. These three elements are how most teachers construct their teaching framework with an unconscious instinct to protect, mentor and model ethical behavior. There have been many descriptions of how the brain works to accept knowledge, find connections with previous ideas or understandings, and then add this new information to, hopefully, be applied to both the present and the future and even to the past. The classroom, the college campus are families, villages, cooperatives and communes. The role of the leader is to inspire, teach and then step aside to allow the students to find their own ideas, information and life lessons like, es, it’s hard to share a small room with someone you don’t particularly like.

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After years of teaching writing and literature my teaching philosophy might be summed up by the phrase, ‘We’re all in this together.’ Several years ago I was assigned to teach Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses to a group of extremely driven Advanced Placement students at New Trier High School. While I appreciate Faulkner and feel capable of teaching most novels with the possible exception of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which I still haven’t read, Go Down, Moses had me stymied from nearly the first paragraph. There was a deadly combination of missing punctuation, unknown vocabulary, obscure allusions and elliptical action. In short, I was stumped and very wary of exposing this confusion to my class who had expressed healthy skepticism about a long-term sub who had shown up eager to help them forget their “real” teacher. I took that book apart. I read, reread, consulted numerous experts, found criticism and then admitted to the class that I was…

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The only online class I ever took was to fill in a gap in my transcript. In college I eschewed science and math as if they were fatal diseases while welcoming literature, history, and philosophy. One exception, a graduate class I crashed as a freshman at Rutgers taught by the British economist E. P. Thompson who wrote The Making of the English Working Class described on Amazon as: “A seminal text on the history of the working class by one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century.” I loved the class especially the social history part taught by Dorothy Thompson, E. P. ‘s brilliant wife. The social history was based around stories, stories about labor strikes, union battles, descriptions of families and communities, public health, and education. E. P. took over in the spring and began to unpack statistics, graphs of social mobility, and the industrial revolution’s transformation of the British economy. In other words, math.

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