I'd like to raise a question about the whole idea that all good teaching is
necessarily nurturing. I speak here from the standpoint of someone who
played in various organized sports throughout high school and one year of
college, and who then coached high school track and basketball. To me,
coaching is a form of teaching. There's a certain type of coach (Bob
Knight of Indiana is perhaps the best known) who takes a militaristic
approach to coaching. And while widely reviled, they often develop
extremely intense, lifelong emotional relationships with their players,
usually a consequence of the demanding and at times brutal efforts of the
coach to challenge the players to reach a higher level of performance,
which they ultimately appreciate even if they loathe them at the time they
happen. I think that we need to take into account the full range of
teaching approaches, even if they contradict our beliefs about what's best
and even if some practices are quite different from our own.
Peter