Starters

Our Faculty

I’ll preface this by saying that its probably common knowledge among trained educators; no doubt the stuff of Pedagogy 101. Not having had the benefit of learning how to teach before actually stepping into the job, this kind of thing comes to me through observation. So, here is one:

Teaching is like starting a car. The teacher is the starter. Information is the gas. Wisdom is the air that mixed with information yields a mixture of knowledge that is worth something neither is alone. No information leads to continued ignorance. Too much floods the cylinders and you are further away from the goal of motivating down the road than you were before you began.

Back in the days when manual transmissions were common and before safety interlocks to protect us from ourselves, it was possible to put a car in gear, turn the key, and cause the car to limp forward a bit powered only by the starter using battery power. If one tried to head down the road this way, either the battery would give out or the starter would burn up in short order. But stir a cold motor to movement using a starter, make the parts begin to move in their internal dance without requiring any actual work from them just yet, then feed in just the right amount of fuel mixed with the right proportion of oxygen to make it volatile, and provide a spark at just the right moment – then, VROOM! You have power. Keep feeding some fuel and warm the engine to its new found status of moving and sucking fuel and producing power and soon it will be ready to motivate the vehicle down the road. As long as there is a supply of fuel to be had, it will continue. This power will not only far outstrip the starter’s original ability to get the car to move forward a little bit, it will also recharge the battery to provide juice for the starter to do it’s job again in due time.

A single semester in a class or even four years of college can come nowhere close to providing enough education to send a person through life on any path any more than a little starter motor can propel a car down the interstate. The best one can expect from any formal education is a start in the ability to ingest and use knowledge and feed one’s self through a lifetime of learning. Maybe I can motivate, inspire, model, demonstrate, or otherwise coerce my students from a static state to some kind of momentum, but they must take off and fly by themselves. Education is a lifelong process. We should probably award diplomas at funerals instead of at “commencements.”