The Reasons I Love to Teach

Thank you, Marty. I am honored and flattered to be standing here. Since the reason I’m standing here is because of my teaching, I thought I would share the reason I love doing it. So here are three of the reasons I love to teach, with anecdotes.

Reason #1 why I love teaching. I get to learn a lot. Maybe this experience is familiar to you. You read, watch, or have explained to you something brand new to you. You think, “I got this.” Then you go to share this new learning with someone else, and as they look at you with a bewildered face, you think, “I don’t got this.” I had that feeling certainly after my son explained his doctoral research — ​​Murine Immunity-Related GTPase M Proteins Regulate Immunity to Intracellular Infections — to me. I understood the military metaphor of invading pathogens being met by a general infantry response before special forces got called in. But when I tried to explain his research to someone else, the “I got this” quickly dissolved to “I don’t got this.” I also experienced the “I don’t got it” feeling when working on a product teaching electric current to fourth-graders. How do I explain “free electrons” flowing from atom to atom?

Nothing pushes your own comprehension like taking responsibility for someone else’s. You really need to understand the domain. I’ve taught math, social studies, and, of course, learning design. Over 40+ years in the educational publishing business, I’ve been part of over 100 products covering topics across the domains. I have learned a lot of content deeply enough to begin to think about how someone else might understand it. Learning all that new stuff is awesome, but it’s barely half of the job.

I also needed to learn about the audience. What do they already know? What metaphors and analogies will make an abstract concept meaningful? What motivates and engages? As a teacher, I get to learn about people and how and why they do what they do. People are wonderfully complex and diverse. That people learning, which is even cooler than the content learning, happens everywhere.  

Cue personal anecdote. Years ago I was working on a large math intervention program for students in middle school and above who were two or more years behind. These are students with long histories of failure in mathematics and deep feelings of disengagement. Math never made sense to them. As usual I turned to the experts. I went to Singapore to learn from some of the authors of the Singapore maths curriculum. I reached out to Carol Dweck to discuss ways to activate a growth mindset in these students. I worked with Bill McCallum, one of the writers of the then new Common Core Math Curriculum in the U.S. on an appropriate set of standards and progressions for this population. To get at how we might make conceptual math meaningful, I even turned to George Lakoff. Some of you may know Lakoff’s book, Metaphors We Live By. You are less likely to know he co-wrote Where Mathematics Comes From. He talks about how we need metaphors to understand concepts we never experience, like infinity. So I asked George how we make math concepts understandable to the kids I was trying to reach. He said to use things from their lives. “Like what?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “You need to ask them.” I then I got a glimpse on the NY Subway. I overheard a group of adolescents having a rich mathematical discussion. They were debating who was a “better” basketball player, Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. I wanted to throw in Lebron James, but I held back. Although they weren’t using any numbers, their debate showed mathematical thinking in action. How do you measure each player’s impact on their teammates? How much did they make those around them better? I went back to my math expert Bill McCallum and shared the story. Is this the mathematical thinking you want? Yes! Cool, math that wasn’t about about pizzas and trains traveling at different rates and that came right from the students.

Working with students from around the world is especially awesome learning for me. You are so wonderfully diverse. Thanks students. I learn more from you every year than you learn from me.

Reason #2 why I love teaching. It’s personal. I want to give a shout out to my 3D group this spring. Our topic was personalized learning, and I loved our conversations and willingness to disagree. We made distinctions between individualized education — giving each student the right challenge and content at the right time — and personalized education — tapping the interests and personal characteristics of each student to make learning more engaging and relevant. When the members of the 3D group, though, talked about classes that moved them, they weren’t individualized or personalized. They were personal.

There’s a book — A Special Relationship: Our Teachers and How We Learned — that’s an anthology of 75 noted Americans describing their special teachers. The stories describe teachers who made unrelenting demands on their pupils, teachers who showed a special interest in a student, teachers who commanded complete attention and those who embraced playfulness. The pedagogies described vary widely, but one commonality runs through them all: a sense of personal connection.  

Cue another personal anecdote. In 1997, Sebastian Junger published his first blockbuster book, The Perfect Storm. The true story, about a fishing vessel caught in a horrible storm, was later made into a feature film starring George Clooney. Some of you are old enough to remember it. Some of you, I expect, are a bit too young. It’s a riveting book, although I found one of his later books, Tribe, particularly relevant to today’s world. With The Perfect Storm, Junger was getting a lot of press, appearing on talk shows. This is a time before people had their own personal news feeds, so everybody knew who he was. I was at a wedding on Cape Cod for one of the employees of Tom Snyder Productions, a pioneering edtech company I helped launch in the 1980s. Tom Snyder, the core founder, had been a beloved science and social studies teacher at Shady Hill Academy, just down the road here in Cambridge. And one of his students had been Sebastian Junger. At the wedding, I kidded Tom about being old, having a former student who was now a literary celebrity. The morning after the wedding, I took a walk through the town of Chatham, and who should be sitting at a table outside the local bookstore ready to sign his book? Sebastian Junger. I went into the store, bought a book, and brought it to the table. I told Sebastian that I had just been with his former fourth-grade teacher, Tom Snyder. Suddenly Sebastian’s rugged, handsome face softened and his eyes widened. “Does he… Does Mr. Snyder know that I wrote this?” It was so sweet. He wanted his fourth-grade teacher to be proud of him.  

I worry about the day when children long for their chatbots to be proud of them. Maybe technology can productively individualize and personalize, but, please, let’s keep the personal human. I’ve spent a long, successful career in EdTech. The tech doesn’t care. It can’t. We can.

Reason I love teaching #3. You never know. Those of us who have been teachers can likely recount a story of someone approaching us at a conference or event or even on the street and telling us how we changed their lives. And we say, Oh wow, and wonder, Who are you? Junlei Li can tell you all about the power of small acts. You just never know what and when something — an explanation, a touch on the shoulder, a compliment, a critique — will click. So I always try to be present and thankful.  

Cue final anecdote. There was a time when I would annually attend a small conference at UCLA hosted by an evaluation organization called CRESST. One year, an aging academic named Dr. Edmund Gordon gave a lunchtime keynote. He’s now 103 years old, and his passion for fairness and respect for learner diversity has never waivered. Well, I went up to his table as people were settling in for lunch. I said, Dr. Gordon, I’m David Dockterman. He looked at me, waiting for me to continue. I kidded him, I can’t believe you don’t recognize me, I was a student of yours at Yale over 40 years ago. He smiled. I continued, I just want you to know that you helped set me on a path in education that I continue to follow today. You taught me that fairness is a right, and I am still fighting the fight.  Then came the tears, from him, and from members of his family. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to touch people’s lives, even when you have no idea if and when that touch matters. And then expressing gratitude for having been touched is, according to the research, healthy. I get both. As a teacher I get so many chances to unknowingly influence a life, hopefully in a positive way, and I get to acknowledge how much I learn each year from students and colleagues, and, when I can, I get to thank a prior teacher too.

I love to learn. I value the personal connections. And I thank you parents, family members, and friends for sharing the students with us. And I thank you students for all you’ve given me. Congratulations.