>I'd like to raise a question about the whole idea that all good teaching
is necessarily >nurturing.
It seems to me that there is in American culture a tendency to regard
"nurturing" as an essentially soft, "feminine" form of activity, which
leads to the development of spinelessness on the part of the nurturee,
and grows out of a "touchy-feely" mindset on the part of the teacher.
Now anybody who has ever gardened knows that pruning, for example, is a
necessary part of nurturing some species of plants - for instance,
pruning a rose bush back in a "brutal" fashion is actually a prerequisite
for it to put out new growth. Challenging a student to achieve at a
higher level is truly a form of nurturing in the teleological sense. (I
would consider George Hillocks to be one of the most "nurturing" teachers
I ever had, but his nurturing sometimes felt indistinguishable from being
hit over the head with a medium-sized brick.) What saves the student
from feeling demeaned and humiliated in the face of such a challenge is
the realization that the teacher cares on an elemental level what happens
to her/him *as a person* - not as an abstract "student," and that the
teacher would not deliberately hand him/her a harder task than the
student could manage.
>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,
I am very cautious about the Anglo-American use of team sports as a
paradigm for anything except old-fashioned conventional war. The vast
majority of situations most men (and almost all women - after all, how
many women are even now playing contact sports?) require a far different
type of practice, one which is anything but "militaristic." I trained in
traditional Shodokan karate under a traditionally-oriented sensei (I was
one of only three or four women in the dojo), and have been subjected to
some "mildly" extreme forms of training, but never did I or anyone in the
dojo "loathe" our sensei or sempai. There was a strong bond based on
mutual respect, reinforced by dojo etiquette, which made us realize that
the physical suffering we underwent in training was for our own
development, and that the only thing which prevented us from bowing off
the floor and walking away was our own self-respect.
>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.
With all due respect for other people's choices of practice and
philosophy, I strongly feel that the use of the team
contact-sport/military paradigm in other contexts where it is not
appropriate - e.g. education or business - can cause significant harm.
In my opinion human life is founded on basic cooperation, not conflict,
even though, as stated above, I don't believe in simplistic definitions
of either term.
Respectfully,
Rachel Heckert
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