Not one of our teachers was a champion

Elizabeth Green, a Spencer fellow in education reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has written a feature story "Building a Better Teacher" in the NY Times Magazine about a book by Doug Lemov to be published in April, “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”

It's an enlightening and stimulating article about what must be an equally challenging new book.

It made us think about how many very poor teachers we studied with over the years. Yes, even some of the teachers whom I have extolled in the past were as terrible at the art of teaching as they were brilliant in their cognitive mastery and presentation of their disciplines.

We don't know if this is part of the Lemov taxonomy, but on occasion we imagined that the champion exceptional teacher will know the interior nature of each of his or her students and teach to them according to their individual styles of learning, to draw out and develop their native talents. (Um, we wonder why it is that we cannot recall meeting such a teacher.) And we wondered how successful we have been at trying to do those champion things.