Fall 2018: The joy of teaching

The most important principle of joy for teaching a business class I learned from my mother, years before I started teaching -- and I started teaching in 1973. The principle is that every person should "leave the world a better place than you found it." There are multiple variations of this concept, "Teach a village to raise fish," or, "Make the world a better place." You get the idea.

There is another principle I learned more recently -- even though that was a good fifteen years ago -- and it came from John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, who addressed the first session of his two-year lecture course as follows:

“Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies that (will) form a noble adventure…Let me make this clear to you. ..nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”

Students taking business classes often 'learned' most of what they believe to be true about business from the media and teachers who know nothing about business. In many cases, those in the media and teachers outside of business at least distrust if not dislike or abhor 'business' as some form of greed, cheating and manipulating trusting customers. So the second joy of teaching principle is to help students to really think critically, to look at the evidence, to question the rhetoric and -- to put it bluntly -- to detect and call out 'rot' when they hear it from their teachers.

And to cite another favorite teacher turned poet, Taylor Mali, when a student asks, "Are we going to be tested on this?" Mali replies: "Every single day of your lives!"