flashback to poor teaching

[alexr_rwx]

Recently I've been thinking a lot about teaching.

In 1999 or so, I was in high school Spanish class, and we were talking about the Spanish Civil War. Somehow or another the teacher managed to make it seem simultaneously boring, complicated, and morally ambiguous. This being a war in which a (basically) Fascist movement overthrew a republic, Hitler did air strikes against innocent civilians in the Basque Country, and Anarchists, Communists, and George Orwell fought the Fascists, unsuccessfully. And then there was a dictatorship until the 1970s.

Truly a monumental achievement, in the realm of teaching poorly. I'll be OK in the Fall if I can just channel that experience, and do the opposite.

Oh, and! I'm up to 24 students enrolled in my class :) Had to increase the enrollment cap, yessss.

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Was the teacher from the US or from Spain, or elsewhere? Leaving aside our own political variability, I'm told there's still a strong pro-Franco component to Spain. They never publicly repudiated Franco and fascism, just sort of sidled onward. Pinochet's similar for Chile I think, even though he did step down; tourist guides say "DON'T GO SHOOTING YOUR MOUTH OFF ABOUT PINOCHET THEY MIGHT LIKE HIM."

So might be less incompetent teaching than deliberate spin. Maybe.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

She was estadounidense, but yeah! I hadn't really thought about Chile. Interesting!

I was wondering, as I wrote this, whether it was deliberate spin; maybe she was quietly hard-right or had some bizarre compulsion to make things seem Fair and Balanced.

She was sort of a bitter person; she got run out of a phd program where she was studying Spanish literature of the 17th century (which she said was boring), then ended up teaching a bunch of kids who didn't respect her and were quite rude. And this was at a nice private school! The classes weren't nearly so rowdy around any other teacher. She left silently a year or two later, never said anything about it. I don't think she liked us.