- Author
- Gardner, M. Robert
- Publisher
- The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ
- ISBN
- 881632813
- Table of Contents
-
On Essaying Teaching
Beginnings
Bk. I The School of Soft Knocks
The Furor to Teach
The Unknown Student
Gulliver at Home and Abroad
On Teacherly Versatility
The Warp and the Woof
On Creativity, Discipline, and Other Desiderata
A Concise History of Teaching
Concise Addendum to a Concise History of Teaching
Bk. II A Gentle Symbiosis: The Student and the Teacher
On New and Old Beginnings
Gumbel's Gambit
Hidden Questions
On Catching Burrs
A Brief Case Of Hidden-Question Chasing
More on the Besetting Challenges of Hidden-Question Catching
Some Added Questions on the Question of What Attention to Hidden Questions Is Good For
On Passing Events
Other Clues to Hidden Questions
On Purple Trees, Purple Cows, Telling Right from Wrong, and Bearing the Distresses of Being Wrong
More Reflections on the Nature of Hidden Questions
Once More Backward
On the Importance of Being a Bit Off
On Trying to Teach in Large Groups as Well as Small, or Almost as Well
On Finding Three-Ring Circuses and on Other Merits of Tending to Hidden Questions
Afterword: Studenthood
Other Thoughts on Assessing Teaching
In an era in which the teaching enterprise is freighted with tactics, techniques, and methods, M. Robert Gardner guides us back to the spirit of teaching. He writes especially about the dilemmas and challenges of teaching, about how it feels to be trying to teach. A clinical teacher of psychiatry and psychoanalysis for over four decades, Gardner is both enlightening and entertaining in relating his own teacherly struggles, including his efforts to harness the teacher's ever-present furor to teach" and thence to discern and engage his students' "hidden questions." Written in simple but evocative prose, On Trying to Teach is a wonderful companion volume to Self Inquiry (1983). In the earlier work, Gardner explored the play between patient and analyst; now, in the same gracefully self-reflective voice, he turns to the play between student and teacher. Gardner's provocative, often iconoclastic musings will goad teachers of all subjects to reflect anew on their calling, on what exactly it means to teach. Analysts and other clinical readers will take special pleasure in the humane psychoanalytic sensibility that not only infuses Gardner's own teaching, but shapes his approach to the most basic questions about teaching and learning in general. (From the Publisher)