More Things in Heaven and Earth: The Only Jew in a Catholic School: Epiphanic Teaching

By Philogia Prima

Teaching is not an activity that necessarily causes learning. Nor is learning always the result of having been taught by someone or something.

So, what is teaching—and more specifically—what is good teaching?
Philogia Prima draws on her experiences as a teacher to answer those questions—while also sharing her observations about academics as the only Jew in a Catholic high school.

She explains that teaching is not always a means of communicating knowledge about something or someone external to either teacher or students.
But having the confidence to function as a teacher should be the product of a teacher’s knowledge and belief—call it faith—in the value of whatever is being taught. If a teacher is neither knowledgeable nor aware of what is lacking, confidence is not there, and students can sense its absence.

Moreover, if a teacher never says, “I don’t know,” he or she is doing students a disservice. Students need to be reminded that learning is a process that sometimes emanates from, but just as often, includes the teacher.

Whether you’re a parent, teacher, administrator or someone else trying to help students learn, you’ll find valuable insights in More Things in Heaven and Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Aug 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781489716613

Philogia Prima

Philogia Prima is the only Jew in a Catholic high school. As such, her experiences and observations are unique. Philogia currently lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

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Copyright © 2018 Philogia Prima.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-1662-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1663-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1661-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018903790

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 08/24/2018

Part 1

Teaching

I earn a salary for doing something called teaching, but even though I tried to define the word some years ago when I wrote my PhD thesis, I couldn’t. I still can’t. Nevertheless, I always tell people that’s what I do, if asked. Or that’s what I try to do, showing I can use a verb if necessary. It’s often much easier to say what something is not than what it is.

Teaching is not an activity that necessarily causes learning. Nor is learning always the result of having been taught by someone or something. And teaching is not always a means of communicating knowledge about something or someone external to either teacher or students. Still, having acknowledged that I cannot define the word teaching, I nevertheless offer a few observations about whatever the hell it is I do—and probably don’t do.

During the past several years, the teacher-centered classroom has become a pejorative description, according to many of the folks in academia,¹ and it’s definitely less desirable than student-centered one. By teacher-centered, what is now called chalk-and-talk is usually meant. Chalk-and-talk is currently considered pretty bad stuff, but it’s what I do a lot of when I engage in teaching, whatever that is. Depending on the definition of success, I even have one now and then.

The nature of teaching is such that neither its negative nor its positive effects manifest themselves quickly. Other than the usual tests, either standardized or specially designed, it’s often impossible to determine the success or failure of teaching because eons may pass before a student recalls an element of a particular course or subject and applies it to a current situation. And there are so many components or elements to any given class that only a small portion of them will be mentioned or discussed in what follows. The first category of components is the aesthetic aspects of teaching, including recognition that, in part, teaching is a performance.

If we want students to write well (a generally agreed-upon goal) and exercise control over the language, they need as many role models as possible. Some of these models ought to include various readings, recognition of writers whose works are agreed upon by many to be good writing, and hopefully some of their teachers acknowledged by both adults and students’ adolescent contemporaries as worth imitating.

The goal of becoming a skilled writer is an especially useful one for understanding the mimetic concept of aesthetics because writing is a necessary and utilized process in nearly all academic subjects. To wit, just about every academic subject involves writing. As Aristotle notes,² people are imitative by nature, so it is incumbent upon teachers to be worthy of imitation. This does not mean that one particular teacher serves as the model but that each teacher should cultivate and display a set of behaviors, characteristics, and techniques that distinguish one particular instructor from all others. One way to establish this distinction is to pay attention to students’ visual sense. Once students’ attention is directed toward the stage, it becomes somewhat easier to help them improve their writing. It’s never easy.

It is really much easier for female teachers to set themselves apart from each other than for male teachers. Men do not have as great a variety of clothing, colors, jewelry, etc., from which to choose. Most men would balk at wearing high heels, dangling earrings, mascara, and the like. Women can wear skirts, pants, and all this other stuff with impunity. However, establishing a style that differentiates individual teachers from one another is somewhat more complicated than just deciding what to wear on any given day.

It’s never a good idea for a teacher to wear anything that is too youthful, which looks plain pathetic and silly. Again, it’s easier for men than for women to avoid this, but really, it’s not difficult to make a conscious effort to eschew the desire to imitate students rather than nurture the opposite effect. There is an enormous gap between establishing and maintaining an individual adult style and using the fads of the