When I teach a class that somehow feels flat, or I say the wrong thing in responding to a student's question in class, I often help myself feel better about it by reminding myself that the stakes are low. I'm not teaching medical students to make an incision or diagnose cancer. I'm not telling architecture students that a particular structure can support 100 tons when it's really just 10.
Sometimes, though, a bad teaching moment can have unpredictably devastating butterfly effects.
Act I of this week's episode of This American Life tells such a story. It's Martin Luther King Day, 1994. A high school teacher in Oakland, California, takes a bunch of 14- and 15-year-olds to a movie theater to see Schindler's List to teach them about the Holocaust. The movie's just out and on the big screen. Perhaps the teacher has already seen the film; perhaps he hasn't. But what he doesn't do is prepare the kids what they're about to see.
From that mistake flows a river of pain. I can't begin to tell you how fateful that one pedagogical lapse proved to be.
It's really worth a listen. It made my brain and heart hurt in equal measure. Perhaps it will yours. At a minimum, it'll remind you how important it is to teach with great thoughtfulness and care.
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