Camillas Hemsida
Camilla Svensson
ENA 202A Good Teacher or a Bad Teacher?
The best teacher that I have ever had was a corpulent and quite handsome middle aged man who did not use the study literature in History particularly much. Instead, in an extremely fascinating way, he told me and my classmates by heart the many events that took place troughout history. But he did not only talk about historical events. He managed to weave in social, cultural, geographical and even biolgical facts as well. This teacher’s lessions were always interesting, and I learned a great deal from them.
With horror, I can also recall the worst educator I have had. The teacher in Civics was a tall middle-aged man who always wore blue jeans. I remember that I was very puzzled why he had chosen this job, because he did not seem to like teaching. He was mostly irritated and hated to answer his pupils’ questions. There were a few pupils though, perhaps eight or nine of them on the entire school, which he really liked. He loved discussing matters with those “chosen ones”, and he actually seemed to fuss of them to gain their liking in return. By us who were not chosen, he merely seemed to be bothered.Miss Jean Brodie, the main character of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), reminds me of both of these two teachers in my past. It is impossible to categorize her as solely good or solely bad, because she was a good teacher in many ways, but she was also a bad one. However, on the whole she was mainly a good teacher. The interesting aim of this essay is therefore to present the reasons for why Miss Brodie can be said to possess both admirable and abominable qualities. The aim is also to argue for the fact that she was mainly a good teacher.
The first indication that Miss Brodie was superior in her profession comes as early as on the first page of the book. The author lets her readers know that Miss Brodie taught her pupils a whole lot more than what the curriculum prescribed and throughout the book the reader also finds out that the students of Miss Brodie’s often remembered quite well what they had learned at school. Miss Brodie did not exclude the information prescribed in the curriculum, however she often talked about things that deeply interested her. This meant that she did it in a very fascinating way, which in turn further helped her students to remember what they had been told. Useful knowledge is what you know and remember. What is long ago forgotten can not be said to be neither knowledge nor something useful.
Another indication of Miss Brodie’s superiority was her different view of education. “To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul” (36). Miss Brodie compared her view with the one of Miss Mackay, the headmistress, who said that education is a putting in of something that is not there. Miss Brodie also compared these views with the original Latin meaning of some pedagogical words. These comparisons lead her to the conclusion, which me myself would sign under, that her view was the most accurate one as well as the most excellent one. One person can not put something into some one else’s mind unless there is already a prerequisite there for it, and a pupil does not just copy the information around him or her. The pupil has to assimilate, profoundly, the new knowledge into her already gained experiences. As a consequence of this view of education, Miss Brodie interacted more with her students than the other teachers at her school did, which lead to a better understanding in her class.
The discipline that Miss Brodie managed to keep in her class is a third example of the fact that Miss Brodie was a good teacher. It was important to her that her pupils heard everything that was said in the classroom, or wherever their education took place. Therefore she often made her pupils repeat, word by word, what had just been said. She also upheld the discipline by not allowing any crap from her pupils about the other teachers at school; “’Miss Mackay has an awfully red face, with the veins all showing’, said Rose. ‘I can’t permit that type of remark to pass in my presence, Rose’, said Miss Brodie, ‘for it would be disloyal’” (39). Miss Brodie herself did not like Miss Mackay, so her not allowing her pupils to say anything bad about their headmistress was really impressive.
However, there were some indications in the book that Miss Brodie also possed a few abominable qualities. She only seemed to really like the Brodie Set, a group of six girls within the class, with whom she kept most of her conversations. I know from my own experience that is can be devastating not to be one of those favourites. Miss Brodie was not even always nice to the Brodie Set; on one occasion she told a girl “I fear you will never belong to life’s élite” (23) and on another occasion she told a girl that she was “stupid as ever” (45). Miss Brodie did not always allow her pupils to have their own opinions. She was quite good at manipulating them and making them become little copies of her.
As mentioned above, Miss Brodie reminds me of two of my teachers in the past. She also taught her pupils things that were not really on the schedule that day, and she also had her favourites. On the whole, though, the good qualities of Miss Brodie are more important than the bad ones. Several of her pupils claimed at the end of the story that they had got many useful exeriences from her education, that it had been fun and that they liked her as a teacher.
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