2006-04-04 - 10:36 p.m.
I've been thinking about teaching a lot recently.
This has mostly been due to my current course in nuclear physics. I hate it. This fills me with inner turmoil, because I should love it. I mean I'm learning about nuclear physics, so I should feel like the smartest of the smarty pants. It's the first time in a long time that I'm learning about completely new things as well, so it should be extremely exciting to be out of the realm of the mundane; and yet I find myself longing to put myself away from it more and more.
The only real reason I can find for this is my teacher. He himself has a very poor style of teaching, for while he is very friendly his public speaking method of a monotone and tendency to drift of in the middle of sentences and then start completely new ones makes it impossible to pay attention to the man for more than ten minutes. He has also chosen to use the most unhelpful textbook in existance as the sole reading material as well as the source of the assignments.
Every week I have been growing more and more frustrated with the course, because the more I want to understand the subject matter the less I find I am able to with the resources he's provided.
This lack of academic support has been gnawing at me, and has made me grow to remember all the damage a teacher has the potential to do to a student's interest. Sometimes I wish I had been born in the days when a student would have to travel to find a master in the subject, and would just prentice under him for years. Sometimes I just wish I could have some of my favorite teachers over and over again in different subjects. But in the end I come to the fact that I still don't trust teachers, no matter how much I liked them.
I suppose this means I don't trust people if I extend it; and thus without trust the only validation of the knowledge I gain can only come from myself. What a horrifyingly powerful subjective viewpoint this is! With the power of apathy and laziness I can dispel the significance of hundreds, even thousands of years of the work of the minds who came before me. No textbook can ever harm me, if I choose to close it. I can bring all subjects down to the great equivalence of nothing; and yet the unending plains of worthless knowledge become quite boring to traverse after a very short time. Do I stop moving completely, and ultimately allow myself the comfort of mental stagnation? Something about this discomforts me, warns me that stopping means death.
So then to make the world more interesting again, I raise something up from worthlessness again through the power of my attention. But how high should I raise it? Too little, and it's just a mere bump in the road, barely worth the effort of notice. Too high, and it will inevitably cause pain once I begin to stumble. ANd more importantly, what mountains should I even attempt to create, so that I can scale them? Neither history, nor society, nor even my own inner self seems flawless enough to trust that I'm making the right choices.
Once again, no answers. But at least I got most of my homework done.
