Three Somewhat Objective Standards of Good Teaching
by Joshua Gibbs
Are you doing your job properly? Are you a good teacher?
These aren’t questions you should ask yourself often, but you should ask them from time to time. Chances are good, though, that on occasions you find yourself asking these questions, you’ve got a lot of evidence in front of you that says, “No.” Another graduate has abandoned the faith. A sophomore boy you thought well of just delivered a three-minute speech in rhetoric class about how Fortnight is compatible with a classical education, or that TikTok is compatible with classical ed, or Taylor Swift, or whatever. And this is what has prompted the soul searching.
This is the point where many other education essayists will tell you, “But you are a good teacher, in fact. Here’s why you need to believe that.” But I don’t know you, reader. You may be a lousy teacher, and the recognition that you’re a lousy teacher may prompt a great turn in your life toward goodness and honesty that you’ve needed for years. I don’t want to rob you of that. At the same time, I’ve seen good teachers wonder if they’re good teachers. I’ve seen good teachers so discouraged by bad students and bad administration that they’ve bailed on the classroom for less existentially dreadful lines of work.
Lousy teachers who think they’re good teachers and good teachers who think they’re lousy are extreme cases, though. The law of averages suggests most teachers are somewhere in between. “Am I a good teacher?” is a fair question, but it’s also quite broad, and in order to get the answer you need, more particular questions are helpful.
As such, I suggest high school teachers ask the following questions when evaluating their abilities.
How many graduates come back to chat with you? How many former students are in your contacts list? How many former students have you texted, called, or seen in person in the last three years? When students no longer have to talk with you, do they? If graduates don’t stay in touch with you, why?
Graduates don’t necessarily come back to chat with teachers “they had a connection with,” and “making a connection” with students isn’t necessarily the goal. In fact, aiming to “make a connection” with students often comes off as cloying and familiar. Plenty of teachers feel they have connections with students who never come back to chat, to get advice, to share their thoughts and concerns. Whether a student “connects” with a teacher or not, graduates come back to chat with teachers whose lessons and personalities cast a long shadow. Unforgettable teachers, in other words. Teachers who offered an account of the world that seems more accurate over time, not less so.
If your lessons stick, after a few years, there will be some evidence. If you don't have graduates coming back to chat, you should ask teachers who stay in touch with graduates how they do it.
What do you think you’re doing? What are you trying to do? Assuming you could have whatever data you wanted about current students and graduates, what would you want to know?
Let me suggest a rather simple standard for teaching a book well: you have taught a book well if your students ever pick that book up again on their own and read it. If you teach Paradise Lost in such a way that your students never want to touch it again, you’re doing it wrong. You’re too limp, too dull, too analytical, too something. And I’m not suggesting that every student you have has to reread every book you teach them every year for the rest of their lives, but some of your students should be rereading some of the books you taught them from time to time. I’m nearly willing to say that whatever you have to do or say to get students to reread a book later in life is right. That’s a bit subjective, I know, but it’s a question worth pondering often. What do I have to do to get students to reread this later? It will probably generate nine good ideas for every bad one.
Are your classes reducible to something quicker? Is it quick and easy to make up a class that one of your students misses? If so, do you understand why this is a problem?
What would class have to be in order to be irreplaceable? Is class an event that can be truncated into something simpler? Does it take you an hour to present an hour’s worth of material?
Good teachers treat class space as holy ground and class time as a precious, non-renewable commodity that must be treated with great care. If a missed sixty-minute class can be made up with five-minutes of transcribed notes, it’s a fifty-five-minute waste of time. A missed sixty-minute class ought to take sixty minutes to make up. Students understand when their time (and their lives) are highly valued by teachers—and the only way to prove something is important is to lavish time and money on it.
