Executive summary: My personal motivation for teaching is to learn more, which in turn helps me to teach better, in a virtuous circle.
When I was a teenager, my math teacher used to throw a party, once a term, for those of his students whose grandparents he had taught! Although I wasn’t a member of this select group, I can easily understand his sense of accomplishment in having taught members of the same families over three generations. Many teachers say they teach to “make a difference”, and behind this lies the motive to provide an enduring legacy, perhaps even to be a teacher that students can tell their grandkids about. When you extend this to their grandkids’ grandkids, his achievement seems even more remarkable. There’s so much to admire in the selflessness of it: one imagines, particularly with math, that the grandparent would have learned much the same concepts as the grandchild did, perhaps even delivered in a similar way. It speaks volumes for the dedication and the patience of the teacher over decades.
To be honest, I don’t think this really captures why I teach. I’ll readily admit I’m addicted to teaching, and, after 40 years of returning to the teaching of the same subject – math – it looks like it’s a life-long addiction. However, unlike my old teacher, who incredibly would have earned his First Class degree in mathematics back at Cambridge 100 years ago, I am not a specialist in the subject I most love. The matter of mathematics has an eternal quality to it, which I suppose can be comforting in a world where technological and political churn have changed the face of almost every other school subject. But I don’t think that this is why I teach, either. I certainly like, even adore, the subjects that I teach, but for me it’s a point of pride that I teach across numerous subjects and at many levels. I simply couldn’t claim that the sheer beauty of mathematics has kept me teaching for this long.
Nor is it a fascination with technique or methodology. Even since I started teaching, best practices in teaching subjects like physics and chemistry have developed almost beyond recognition. Textbooks are vastly richer (and arguably less usable) than they were, and computer simulation-based laboratories have sprung up to supplement (or supplant) the dusty old labs of my youth. In statistics, a subject I was among the first to teach for O-level examination in central Africa, entire curricula have now emerged, replete with a well-digested pedagogical vocabulary to assist legions of learners in the data-aware 2020s. Actually, I find myself a little put off by these new assistive techniques. I’m not always comfortable seeing the world through the lens of a highly memorable computer simulation, or even of a novel illustration, no matter how vivid, in a glossy textbook.
So, if it’s not a longing for personal legacy, admiration of the theoretical aesthetics or adherence to the modern methodologies that have kept me teaching, what could it be? This question hasn’t been easy to confront, because one would prefer to represent a philosophy that was clearly good or altruistic – this is the reputation of teaching, after all, and who wouldn’t want to be true to that?
I think the truth is that I am not really trying to be a teacher, at least not in the sense that some websites might list “the 7 reasons why people become teachers”. Instead, I think of myself as an ingrained, inveterate learner, addicted (there’s that word again) not so much to the pride of seeing the Aha! moment on a student’s face, as to the joy of finding out more about something already partly known. When you learn something new, it proliferates connections to the things that you already know, and this feels good – at least, it does for me! So, if you take a subject like mathematics, study it quite deeply, and then see a new truth, it can be very satisfying. For me, the teacher’s impulse is then immediately to try to show the new connection to someone else.
I would therefore say that students don’t “learn from me” so much as they “learn with me”, and I think that this is the life-spark of teaching that I really enjoy. I love finding, and giving, insight in the moment. And this makes sense, because we all know that one of the best ways to learn a thing is to teach it; and here we have the converse – one of the best ways to teach a thing is to learn it, right there, with the student. By a hall-of-mirrors effect, both parties teach and learn together.
I don’t mean to imply that you can teach like this without a lot of prior knowledge, understanding, experience and preparation. You can’t; and so of course a teacher has to have these elements securely in place. What I’m saying is that my motivation to teach is inseparable from my motivation to learn. Further, the more I learn, the more I can develop my long-term ability to teach, and the more I can appreciate the beauty of the subjects that I study, and the more I find out about how to learn more (i.e. how to teach again) in the future. So, by continuously learning, I inherit all of the benefits that teachers traditionally ascribe to why they teach. To date, I’ve taught several children of my former students: when the first grandchildren of my former students are ready for my lessons, I trust I’ll be ready to learn with and from them.
The bottom line: I am a teacher because teaching gives me the possibility to learn in the company of other learners, and to make a difference in the lives of my students, deepen my understanding of great intellectual subjects and continuously improve my teaching techniques and methods while doing so.