音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.00]What Makes a Teacher 为师之道
[00:04.63]It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull and long school is.
[00:11.85]The learning by memory of all the basic things one must know
[00:15.45]is a most incredible and unending effort.
[00:18.42]Learning to read is probably the most difficult
[00:21.37]and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain
[00:25.30]and if you don’t believe that,
[00:26.95]watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
[00:29.67]School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun,
[00:34.29]but then, if you are very lucky,
[00:36.46]you may find a real teacher.
[00:38.43]Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of my luck.
[00:43.36]My first was a science and math teacher in high school,
[00:46.75]my second, a professor of creative writing at Stanford,
[00:50.23]and my third was my friend and partner, Ed Ricketts.
[00:54.30]I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist
[00:57.68]and that there are as few as there are any other great artists.
[01:01.62]It might even be the greatest of the arts
[01:04.03]since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
[01:06.86]My three had these things in common:
[01:09.72]they all loved what they were doing.
[01:11.79]They did not tell,
[01:13.43]they catalyzed a burning desire to know.
[01:16.05]Under their influence,
[01:18.14]the horizons sprung wide and fear went away
[01:21.08]and the unknown became knowledge.
[01:23.39]But most important of all, the truth,
[01:25.89]that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and precious.
[01:29.41]I shall speak only of my first teacher
[01:32.35]because in addition to the other things,
[01:34.44]she brought discovery.
[01:35.75]She aroused us to shouting, book-waving discussion.
[01:39.35]She had the noisiest class in school and she didn’t even seem to know it.
[01:43.95]We could never stick to the subject.
[01:46.88]Our speculation ranged the world.
[01:48.73]She breathed curiosity into us so that we brought in facts or truths
[01:53.88]shielded in our hands like captured fireflies.
[01:57.37]She was fired and perhaps rightly so,
[02:00.20]for failing to teach fundamentals.
[02:02.52]Such things must be learned.
[02:04.82]But she left a passion in us for the pure knowable world
[02:08.75]and she inflamed me with a curiosity which has never left.
[02:12.24]I could not do simple arithmetic but through her
[02:15.63]I sensed that abstract mathematics was very much like music.
[02:19.80]When she was relieved,
[02:21.91]a sadness came over us but the light did not go out.