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This book is a small jewel. Robert Gardner, with extraordinary wisdom and gentle humor, writes of the complex nuances of the teaching process. He brings to the understanding of the teacher—
student relationship a psychoanalytic perspective that illuminates it in profound and thought-provoking ways.
Gardner excels as both sage and storyteller, using personal anecdotes from everyday life to illustrate themes of great subtlety. Perhaps a personal story of my own can suggest something of this style, analogous to the way in which the process of supervision can reflect important aspects of the therapeutic process.
My fifth-grade daughter recently participated in a series of sex education classes at her school. The teacher was not a regular faculty member, but an educational consultant from Planned Parenthood who was unfamiliar with this particular group of students. Wholly undeterred by her ignorance of the students' individual needs and feelings, she determinedly launched into her agenda of “covering the material” so as to do her part to alleviate the social ills of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual abuse. The fifth graders reacted in various ways, including stunned silence, embarrassed clowning, and anxious questioning.
Several of Gardner's astute observations are illustrated in this vignette. This teacher demonstrated a passion for teaching that grew from her own commitment to the material but had little connection with the students' interests or readiness. She felt compelled to cover the essentials of her subject as she defined them and treated the students as passive recipients of a basic body of knowledge. Her “furor to teach” (p. 3), as Gardner describes it, was fueled by the sense that the students were in critical need of this knowledge and that only she could provide it within a limited amount of time. Gardner calls this the “double charge of singular necessity and sole possibility” (p. 9), and deplores the way in which such a teacher b