Full disclosure: This isn't an entry about how to teach (hence the ironic quotes around the word "mechanics"). I like to tell the graduate student teachers that I train and supervise that teaching is like yoga. With yoga, if one thinks she's mastered a pose, she's not really doing yoga. Same with teaching. If she thinks she's mastered it and there's nothing to left to learn, she's not really teaching because, to me at least, teaching always includes learning.
Another simile occurred to me today while I was changing the air filter in our car. I initially thought, "No problem." I must have been thinking of a previous car I owned, in which the air filter was a simple, flat style wedge that slipped in and out of a similarly-styled cradle accessible under the hood. Two clips and you're done. However, I opened the hood and realized we have a cone-style filter, which requires more than simply popping a couple of clips. As it turned out, this replacement involved disconnecting tubes from housings and muscling other things out of the way.
Whenever I work on cars, our house, or do any sort of work with my hands, I often think of my Dad. He was a "do-it-yourselfer." He was also a car aficionado, "wrench head," whatever you want to call it, from his teenage years on--always souping up cars and doing repairs himself. When he got hurt and ended up in a wheelchair, I was the one actually doing the repairs on things he couldn't reach. Replacing this air filter, wriggling the housing from its nest of bolts, wires, and tubes, I found myself thinking, "Hmmm. How is working on a car like teaching?" I thought there were several similarities: taking care to assess the situation and your end goal, the approaches to get to that goal, paying attention to detail, problem-solving, etc.
Granted, one could probably liken teaching to just about any endeavor. But my reasons for these comparisons are more important than the comparisons themselves.You see, I was never really interested in the same things as My Dad; I was into literature, writing, and theatre. Laying on my back under our van, assembling parts and pieces that may as well have been from an alien spaceship for all I knew about them, I'd often try to find similarities between his interests and mine: Playwriting is like building an addition to a garage (which my brother and I actually did, in part, assisting a carpenter friend). Writing a story is like shingling a roof (did that, too). Writing a song is like replacing an alternator (yep). I came up with these comparisons to feel closer to him, and I realize I made these comparisons to help convince myself that my leisure pursuits were just as important, just as meaningful, and just as taxing as his.
We were a middle-class family, but all the manual labor I did growing up made me think of ourselves differently. My Dad, although a brake engineer at Ford Motor Company, seemed to me decidedly blue-collar. Growing up, I considered myself from a blue collar family. Thinking about teaching in a more blue-collar way helps me feel closer to him, and alleviates the inexplicable guilt I sometimes feel for doing a job that doesn't require me to use many of the skills he taught me. But teaching does require one to get her hands dirty, to roll up his sleeves and really do some taxing work. I have no misconceptions about that. I suppose my only misconception is that my Dad, were he alive, would somehow see what I do as less valuable than those tasks he and I shared.
