Teaching is often compared to playing baseball, but most people I've talked to get this metaphor all wrong. Most people compare teaching to hitting. When you absolutely kill the lesson you say that you "hit it out of the park." When your students are difficult you say that you have to take whatever they're "pitching" and try your best to put the barrel of the bat on it. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.
But this is all wrong. Teaching isn't like hitting. Hitting is much more passive than teaching. There's a lot of waiting, watching, and reacting that hitters do at the plate. Teachers don't have this luxury in the classroom. A good hitter carefully selects those pitches into which he will invest a precious swing. A good teacher can't be so choosy. She invests in every student.
Teaching is much more like pitching. Specifically, the teacher is like the starting pitcher. The starting pitcher is in control of the game. The decisions that the starting pitcher makes (certainly with the help and guidance of the catcher), and the pitcher's ability to execute these decisions, affect the course of the game much more than the decisions that any one batter makes. Similarly, the decisions that the teacher makes have a heavy impact on the way a particular lesson goes--almost always heavier than the decisions that any one student makes.
Major League pitchers report that they have their "best stuff" (their arm and all their pitches are performing at their best) about 25% of the time. When they have their best stuff, they are dominant and unbeatable. They report that they have "good stuff" (all of their pitches are generally working for them, though maybe not at their best) about 50% of the time. They can hope to keep their team in the game. The 25% of the time when a Major League pitcher does not have his good stuff... that's what really separates the great pitchers from the good ones.
A great pitcher can win even when he does not have his "good stuff." His curve ball hangs in the strike zone, so he knows he can't use it or he will eventually get shelled. His fastball does not have the usual zip, so he better be painting the edges of the plate, or it's batting practice. When the old reliable isn't working, a great pitcher finds another way to win.
8th grade Ethics teacher Greg Henning did not have his best stuff today. It wasn't his fault. He was working with a bad lesson. It was a brand new lesson for this year focusing on the story of George Washington Carver. It would have been a blockbuster lesson, except that the text, which should have brought the courage and resourcefulness of George Washington Carver to vivid life, was instead fairly dull--like a two-seam fastball with no action.
His students read it reluctantly, with a dreary monotone. They got it (thanks to some crafty real-time vocabulary support from Mr. Henning), but they didn't care much about it.
Henning battled through it, though, and kept his team (his students) in the game. Here's how he did it:
The text wasn't getting them, so he let the merits fly. They were all good, legit merits--an unusual and original answer, a brilliant use of textual evidence. As soon as he started throwing merits he got the crowd back into it. The discussion flowed much more enthusiastically.
He went off-script, adding questions of his own to the discussion. What fears do you think Dr. Carver would have felt? Raise your hand if you have ever felt these fears. When? Tell the story. Henning's students, as it turned out, were much more interested in talking about themselves than Dr. Carver.
Bur Mr. Henning did not abandon Dr. Carver. The text wasn't thrilling, yet he still recognized that it was important for his students to know Dr. Carver's story and to be able to relate their lives to it. So now do you see why this was difficult for George Washington Carver?
It would be great if every Ethics lesson provided enough inspiration right there on the page to captivate and motivate students, so that teachers would not have to work as hard as Mr. Henning to engage, energize, and provoke. But this is a quixotic fantasy. In reality, pitchers and teachers don't always have dominant stuff to work with. Sometimes they can win anyways.
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