Research Catalog

Title

On trying to teach : the mind in correspondence / M. Robert Gardner.

Author

Gardner, M. Robert.

Publication

Hillsdale, NJ : Analytic Press, 1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 163 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"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.""--BOOK JACKET. "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."--Jacket

Subject

• Teaching
• Teaching > Psychological aspects
• Teachers
• Teacher-student relationships
• teachers
• Unterrichtspsychologie
• Teacher-student relationship

Contents

BOOK ONE: THE SCHOOL OF SOFT KNOCKS -- The Furor to Teach -- The Unknown Student -- Gulliver and 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 -- BOOK TWO: 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 Questiosn 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.

ISBN

• 088163090X
• 9780881630909

LCCN

94028731

OCLC

• ocm30736683
• 30736683
• SCSB-2042018

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library