I have been a teacher all of my adult life.  Not all of this was classroom teaching because I worked as an editor for many years.  Nevertheless, as an editor, I believed that my task was not merely to "fix" other people's writing but to help them to write more effectively.  Now retired from editing, I still teach part-time in the formal setting of a college classroom, and teaching infuses many other parts of my life – just as it does the lives of many people who don't think of themselves as teachers.

I believe that we are all teachers in the broadest sense of the word.  With children, coworkers, and even complete strangers, we frequently share knowledge and the fruit of experience, all of which can be considered teaching.  My observations here, however, apply more to those who make a vocation of teaching than to the more casual kind of teaching that we all do, though many of the same principles apply.

It should go without saying that the first requirement of a teacher is to be knowledgeable about the subject.  Indeed, I believe that teachers must know more than they intend to teach.  Someone who hopes to teach the fundamentals must know more than the fundamentals.  Curious students, even in basic classes, will raise questions beyond the basics, and instructors must be prepared to answer them.  Sometimes the question may be "Why?" – and the student will become exasperated if the answer is merely repetition of some rule or principle.  Telling why involves knowing more than just rote rules.  To be sure, sometimes the answer to "Why?" is, in fact, "That's just the way it is" (there isn't a reason for everything), but that should be a last resort.

On the other hand, it's vitally important to tailor the presentation to the audience.  I sometimes call this "meeting students where we find them."  People who are knowledgeable in their subjects but can converse about them only with other experts in the subject do not usually make good teachers.  We've all had teachers who spoke over the heads of nearly everyone in the class, and we may even have been awed by them – but we came away more frustrated than enlightened.

Empathy is thus essential.  Teachers must be able to imagine themselves in their students' place.   Many of the best teachers I've had never seemed to forget what it had been like to be a student.  The few I got to know personally had rather vivid recollections of their student days.  When I said something particularly sophomoric (which, at the time, seemed to me the epitome of wisdom), they would say, "Yes, I used to think that way, too," and then they would gently lead me into territory that they had discovered through their experience.

It is easy for teachers to become arrogant.  We are, after all, in positions of authority.  Indeed, I often have uncomfortable memories of times when I fell prey to my own audacious ego, especially when I was young and new to the profession.  One year, for example, I refused to let my students use dictionaries for in-class essays because, I pontificated, "If you don't know how to spell a word, you shouldn't be using it."  In a subsequent class discussion, I needed to write the word bureaucracy on the blackboard and found that I had forgotten how to spell it.  As if they were one person, the class shouted, "If you don't know how to spell a word, you shouldn't use it."  After that, use of dictionaries was permitted for in-class papers.

A sign on the bulletin board in the hallway at the college where I now teach reads:  "We are all ignorant – only of different things."  It's a good message for teachers and has double implications.  In the first place, it is a reminder that students who are ignorant of our particular subjects should not be labeled as ignorant in general.  College students in particular are sometimes brilliant or gifted in fields about which their teachers know almost nothing.  The second implication is that there's always something to learn, some personal dark area of ignorance into which someone else can shed some light.  That someone may happen to be one of one's students.

We teachers often distinguish between students who are teachable and those who are not, usually meaning, at the extremes, those who are eager to learn and those who seem to resist all effort to learn.  Well, we teachers owe it to our students to be teachable ourselves.  Most of us are well aware of the folly of youth and inexperience (no doubt recalling some of our own), but not everything that young people have to offer is folly.  They have a unique perspective, one that may be more open-minded and less tainted by bias than our own is.  We would do well to listen to them.

This does not mean that we should blindly buy into or humor every crazy idea or fad that youth subscribes to.  I'm not particularly pleased with the tendency of some adults to revere youth so much that they never seem to grow up themselves.  I'm not about to let kids run the schools and determine the curriculum.  However, learning is a two-way street.  Lecture (where the teacher expounds what he or she knows and the student merely listens) certainly plays an important role in education, but conversation and discussion are at least equally important and probably more likely to make ideas "stick."  This requires open-mindedness on both sides of the desk.  We cannot expect students to be open to new ideas if we are closed to them ourselves.

Readers may notice that nothing I've emphasized about teaching – knowledge of the subject, empathy with the student, open-mindedness and a willingness to listen – falls neatly into what the schools of education call "methodology."  There are, as far as I can see, no clearly defined "methods" that describe effective teaching, despite the abundance of educationist jargon that has been produced in an effort to define effective methods.  A superior lesson plan is no guarantee that the class will be a success, and it may even prevent success by being too rigid.  It is no coincidence that administrators (especially those who have never taught or haven't done so in a very long time) love lesson plans, whereas most teachers hate them.

When I began teaching, I had rather detailed outlines of what I expected to cover in every class session, and I felt insecure without them.  Gradually, though, my outlines shrank to a list of topics to cover.  After all, I knew the material.  What need did I have for detailed notes?  Gradually, too, I overcame the obsessive-compulsive drive to cover all the topics listed in my plan for a given session.  If students brought up something tangential, as long as it related to the subject, we ran with it.  The experience closely paralleled what I learned over time about writing.  While I needed to have a clear starting point and a general idea of what I was going to say in an essay, my better essays were those in which I let the thought processes develop of their own accord rather than trying to force everything into some pre-formed outline.

Teachers learn to teach by teaching (just as writers learn to write by writing), not by studying "methods."  As we think back to the teachers who influenced us most, it is their individual style, their personalities, their obvious enthusiasm for their subjects – not their "methods" – that made them effective and memorable.  Perhaps Mr. Jones was the first teacher who really seemed to listen to us and be interested in what we say.  Perhaps Miss Smith was the first person whose enthusiasm for literature was so contagious that we caught the reading bug.  Perhaps Mrs. Periwinkle was the first English teacher who presented grammar not as merely a set of rules but as something we could use.  What distinguished them is not something to be found in a methods textbook.

Teaching is an art and a skill.  There is no one way to do it.  Yet living as a teacher is a wonderful existence, whether we do it formally in the classroom or informally in the way we conduct our lives – for to truly be a teacher is to learn something new every day.  Who could ask for more than that?