If only more people viewed teaching as artisanal

Today is Teachers Day in India.  An old country with plenty of great teachers--real and mythical--but where in everyday life teachers are treated like dirt.  Ah, the bundles of contradictions in the old country!

If I refer to myself as a teacher, I would be misappropriating that title from those who are usually referred to when people think of teachers--in the kindergarten through high school system.

• Teachers like the awesome one who taught math--maths, as we called that subject back then: Vimala Sitaraman.
• Teachers like the awesome one who taught English--Mrs. Manson--who, when I talked with a few years ago, could recall a whole bunch of my classmates but told me point-blank, "I don't remember a Sriram at all."

They were teachers.  I think of people like them when I imagine a "teacher."  I owe them thanks by the trainloads.

I am not a teacher. I am a guide.

That is how I approach my responsibilities.  At best, I can perhaps claim to teaching students how to think.

One of the many topics that I force students to think about, and I wished they thought more about, is, well, their own lives and how education fits into it.  Education as being a lot more than merely to earn a diploma that can launch them into careers, including teaching.

As always, I will provide them with contexts to think about the rapidly evolving technological world and will invite them to think about their own futures.  I will remind them that the most important learning they can do is to learn how to learn, because learning will be an important aspect of their professional and personal lives.

The world in which they find themselves to be middle-aged will be profoundly different from the one in which I am a middle-aged crank.

That’s the key: can you complement the new computer technology and use it to provide a better experience rather than just be someone who does a routine thing that anyone could replace you in doing? There’s enough human ingenuity out there and enough demand for new experiences that people will be able to take advantage.
But to get there, we need to rethink education – not just to produce people who can do well on standardized tests, but who can also work in collaborative ways with interpersonal skills.

There are no standardized tests in my classes.  No Scantron sheets. No multiple-choice questions. I force them to think and articulate their interpretations of the vast grey areas.  If we can learn and think, then we are ready for the changes that are coming, and are coming at speeds that we have never ever experienced in history.

I think any young person is going to want a strong liberal arts education to give you the basis to move in a lot of different directions. I actually think it may be that a really strong liberal arts education is going to be more valuable in the future as opposed to a very specific thing by itself. A traditional business program may be less valuable in the future than someone who may have been a humanities major but learned a bunch of science and analytics as well. It’s going to be your ability to deal with what can’t be turned into an algorithm; how well do you deal with unstructured problems and how well do you deal with new situations; that’s really key.

It is simple: if you cannot think and learn, a robot will easily replace you.  Even in "teaching."