Friday, March 06, 2009

Ms. Hempel

What do you think of Ms. Hempel? She thinks she's not a very good teacher -- do you agree? Do you think she likes teaching?
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4 comments:

kc said...

I think she's a fabulous teacher. She's no great scholar, but she appreciates learning and literature and, most especially, seems highly attuned to human nature and the delicacy of individual character. She seems able to sensitively assess the strengths and weaknesses of each of her students and to be responsive to them. She seems to have retained a keen sense of what it's like to be 13 years old, and that serves her — and her students — well.

And she's honest with herself, I think, about the realities of being a teacher, about how she cuts corners occasionally to save herself some grading, etc. The grand lessons she imparts to her students are probably less in their homework and more in the frank classroom discussions (often tangents) she moderates. She's like Miss Jean Brodie, albeit more subdued, in that she can rely to great effect on the force of her own personality. Ms. Brodie would throw out the lesson of the day and instead show slides of her vacation and discuss her favorite works of art and the marriage proposals she has refused. And Ms. Hempel does something similar with the openness of her personality, her willingness to use her own experiences as a lesson.

Miss Brodie lectures the head mistress on the meaning of education, that it's from the Latin educare, meaning "to lead out, not put in." And I think Ms. Hempel has a similar notion, if less articulated, about what education is.

I do think she likes teaching, but she finds it a tad melancholy (how the kids grow up and move on, the repetitiveness of it, how she herself always stays in the seventh grade), and I think the process of aging and finding that she's not as fulfilled at her age as she once assumed she would be makes her feel kind of school-marmish and stagnant sometimes, but she seems to have a natural resiliency that lets her transcend those darker moments.

10:51 PM, March 06, 2009
Ben said...

Yes, she's measuring herself wrong -- she's the real deal.

The comparison with Jean Brodie is apt -- that's the kind of teacher Hempel is, in her own way.

12:27 PM, March 08, 2009
Erin said...

Yes, great analysis. I love the fact that she doesn't bullshit them, that she's willing to talk to them openly about the real world and her personal life and sex. I love that she appreciates their individual quirks.

12:39 PM, March 08, 2009
Ben said...

When I was teaching, I was amazed at how much I was expected to stifle the students. For all the talk about fostering creativity, adults are terrified of kids not fitting into the mold we make for them. Unfortunately, it's very easy for a child to be stifled -- and you can see them die a little bit each time it happens.

9:16 PM, March 09, 2009

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