Teaching Topic and Tip of the Week – 12.9 – 12.15

Today’s Teaching Topic:

Process vs. Product

The quote for the week is from Maxine Hong Kingston

“When I’m teaching, I tell my students: It’s all process. Don’t even think of product.”

What a good reminder of a 21st Century concept that is all too easily forgotten, especially approaching the semester’s end.

Today’s Teaching Tip: 

Teachers and their students can often forget an important part of the educational equation.

“Is this on the test?”

I, like many teachers, get fatigued by the comment students often make. I think they believe they are clever when they say it (or a variation of it): “When I am going to use this in ‘real life?'”

Education should not be all about the product. It’s should not be all about “Oh, yes, I see. I learn this chemistry and now I can cook” or “Okay, with this geometry theorem, I can hang pictures straight in my little apartment, especially if I mix in some physics.”

No, education is better pitched when it focuses on process, on the ability to teach kids to think critically. The details of what we teach – the War of 1812, who wrote She Walks in Beauty, etc – are readily available to anyone with the internet.

The ability to consider what those things mean in a broader perspective, to apply them to life, that’s what we’re called to teach.

That’s education.

Gary Kubiak – A Good Man

I’ve always admired Gary Kubiak.

He was John Elway’s understudy for some 9 years in Denver and was offensive coordinator for the back-to-back Super Bowl winning teams of the late 1990’s.

His sons attended the high school at which I teach and, though I never taught them, one of them was involved in a summer program I was running in the 90s which had some mandatory days of attendance. Unbeknownst to me, those days overlapped with some time the Kubiaks wanted to take off – a few precious vacation days away from the grind of the NFL.

Mrs. Kubiak called me and explained that “Gary gets so few days off, we were wondering, if it’s okay with you and the school, if there is any way these days could be made up at a different time.”

Humble. Graceful. Unassuming.

That’s what I’ve always considered the Kubiaks.

The week Gary is fired, he takes out the ad below in the Houston Chronicle. 

 

It confirms all I’ve ever thought of the man and his family.