Art of Teaching Highet

The Art of Teaching
Gilbert Highet
New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Why read it? There is more to teaching than simply standing up in front of a classroom and telling students what to do. The basics in teaching. Reading this book motivates the reader to become a teacher.

Principles of good teaching:

Teaching is an art because it involves emotions.
Show the students the challenges available in their chosen fields of study.
Good teachers continue to learn their subjects.
Know your students as individuals.
In dealing with problem students, keep the relationship impersonal.
Do not try to make brilliant students replicas of yourself.
Your audience shouldn’t feel that they know exactly what you are going to say next.
Irony and sarcasm imply intellectual domination.
Try to get all the members of the class working together.
Students need to feel that the teacher wants them to learn.
Students need to understand the purpose of what they are learning.
Show students the semester’s or the year’s plan.
Review what you have taught.
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Don’t make the mistake of assuming that students have thought about the topic you are teaching them.

Great teachers in history include Socrates, Plato, Christ, the Jesuits, Dewey, among others.

Fathers should talk to their children about their jobs.

Best sentences:
“I believe that teaching is an art, not a science…. Teaching involves emotions which cannot be systematically appraised…and human values, which are quite outside the grasp of science.”

“The first essential of good teaching, then, is that the teacher must know the subject. That really means that he must continue to learn it.”