Timeless Teaching: Great Alliteration, Even Better Philosophy

I believe that in order for students to gain a deep understanding of material and to
obtain a higher level of thinking, the teaching must be relevant and meaningful to their
lives. I have developed my own philosophy that I call “Timeless Teaching.” Based on
meaningfulness, timeless teaching is the philosophy that, through meaningful and
relevant teaching, students will leave a course with new knowledge and concepts that
they will retain and be able to use for the rest of their lives. Teachers must find a way to
make content mean something to students so that they may be able to have independent
and well-developed thoughts, be able to think critically, and be able to apply concepts
from one subject to another.
An important piece of timeless teaching is creating a need for students to know.
This is crucial because it is a defining factor in what makes a good teacher. Good
teachers get students to question content and seek answers. If there is no need to know,
students won’t be able to find that strong connection to the material. Teachers need to be
innovators, always tweaking and reevaluating lessons to fit the students in front of them.
With that, teachers can teach the same content, while making it meaningful to a new
group of students.
Another important part of timeless teaching is the quality versus quantity aspect
of content. Teaching is far more powerful when content is in depth and rich, rather than
thin with more information and facts. This is made difficult in some cases because of
state mandated testing and because of particular subjects, but in an ideal world, teachers
would teach a concept until students have a thorough understanding of it, instead of
moving on because there is a required amount of content to complete for a final exam.
Students retain far less information when it is taught to only be tested. How many times
have you heard of a student asking “will this be on the test?” or “do we need to know this
for the quiz?” Students shouldn’t be concerned with examinations, they should be able to
take a test/quiz at anytime and be successful. The best teacher I ever had gave pop
quizzes on a regular basis. Not a single person in that class was ever afraid of them
because the material was taught with such passion and clarity, it was hard to forget.
Timeless teaching is not only what I believe good teaching to be, but I believe that
it is the entire purpose of education. Education should change a person for the rest of
their life. Either it brings about new ideas and instills a different sense of being, or it
strengthens the thoughts that someone already had and allows them to continue on their
path. Either way, knowledge learned should be retained for a life-time, otherwise, what
was the point of learning it? Although, to be clear, this does not mean that math students
must always remember the quadratic formula or that chemistry students should remember
how many protons are in an atom of zinc, or that music students must remember what
andante ​means. It means that students should learn the skills to synthesize information
into something that is relevant to them and their life. Intelligence isn’t measured by
memory skills, it is measured by the ability to think abstractly and creatively. These are
the concepts that students should be taking away from each and every course that they
take. They should learn new ways to think outside the box, create new things, and see the
world differently.
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