Teaching Is More Than Instruction and Tests

¶ … Teacher I Ever Had

As we move from childhood to adolescence and on through young adulthood and beyond, many of us can look back and focus on one particularly effective teacher or professor we were blessed to have had the opportunity to have learned from. There is a tsunami of evidence that as bright, alert young people we are like sponges when it comes to learning new and interesting things about the world. That is especially true when we take a course from a very effective teacher or professor. Thesis Statement: When a teacher has a unique, charismatic way of making important points and motivating students to rise above mediocrity -- and who gets the most out of everyone because he establishes trust and his lectures are compelling -- students become better people and more prepared for the "real world" outside the university.

Learning journalism is a joy and an inspiration when the instructor has the know-how, the experience and the enthusiasm to lead the class through a comprehensive yet fascinating style of instruction. In my case, Professor Hayes kept our class riveted with an endless series of compelling news-related incidents. These stories were first-person, very detailed and always interesting because he earned his stripes as a beat reporter on the mean streets of Chicago in the 1950s. Every student in the class sat up straight and paid close attention to all of Hayes' stories because a pop quiz might follow any story; he was testing us to see how much detail we had gleaned from the stories. A reporter has to be constantly listening, thinking, and recording events and people's actions, and Professor Hayes' way of helping us learn was to share an incident in his journalism past; he would also share true stories about great journalists and how they broke stories that unveiled political corruption, corporate pollution.