HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023740.jpg

x Preface teaching than the one actually employed commonly today. Milo at least thinks that the end result will be the student doing something that the teacher did. In school, teach usually means helping the stu- dent to know something that the teacher told him. Milo doesn’t know about that definition of teaching yet since he hasn’t been to school, but, unfortunately, he soon will. I have been thinking about teaching for more than 50 years. First I thought about it when my father said that was what I was going to be. Then I thought about it as I watched my teachers teach me and, no less important, watched my father teach me. My father eventually retired from his civil service job and became a junior high school teacher in Harlem. He loved his new job and, I have to assume, became a good teacher. I say it that way because he was certainly not a good teacher for me, at least not when he thought he was trying to teach me. I remember him trying to teach me algebra and it making no sense to me whatever. I remember him teaching me sports and I mostly think of him as being totally frustrated with my inability to perform as well as he had hoped. (Being a jock was a big thing to my father.) I did fine in algebra without his help and, in fact, became a math major in college. But, as I look back at it, my father was my first and best teacher. Why do I say this after all the bad things I have just said? Because my father was at his best when he wasn’t teaching but was just saying what was on his mind and arguing. He often talked about history because he liked history. And when he talked about history and I asked questions, he became a good Socratic teacher. He forced me to think and question in our discussions. The conversations were often very heated but also were a highlight of my intellectual life at that time. My father didn’t teach me anything except how to think. That’s better than algebra, actually. For this I am grateful. So, I thought about teaching then and I thought about it again when I went to college. As part of my father’s conversations with me about life, he talked a great deal about his own experiences. His mother sent him to New York City to live with his aunt in Brooklyn and to go to college. He was 15 and had, until that time, spent his entire life on a farm/hotel run by his parents in upstate New York. He was unprepared for the city, had no money, missed his family, and had no idea why he wanted to go to college at all. Did I mention that he was 15? He had graduated first in his class (a class of 16, I HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023740