Taught by the master

What qualifies you to be a teacher? Well, your teaching qualification, obviously. But, I mean, apart from a bit of paper with your name embossed on it, what quality must a teacher possess that means their wisdom is worth listening to?

In a few weeks, I will be lucky enough to attend a course on humorous writing taught by comedy legends Nigel Planer (Neil from the Young Ones) and Sally Phillips (Miranda, Bridget Jones Diary, Smack the Pony). Obviously, the first question on everyone's lips will be “but why do you need to learn to write comedy when you already have the book and the blog?”. Well, I'm often told “it's never too late to learn”, frequently by people who've just read my blog. More importantly, there is always someone with something to teach. They've been there, done that.

Which raises the question, what is the worth of teachers who haven't been there, or done that, but simply attended the same courses they are now teaching? Is there a risk that the lessons you've learnt are simply the repeated mantra of an isolated academia, with no practical application in the real world?

It's a tricky subject, and there are now rising numbers of courses that take this question and simply bypass it by employing qualified experts. Alan Sorkin - writer of the West Wing, A Few Good Men, and Moneyball – is teaching a masterclass in screenwriting. Matthew McConaughey has elected to teach a class in film making at his alma mater, the University of Texas. Christina Aguilera is giving singing lessons. Even more academic classes have been getting the expert treatment, with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Novig, inventors of the Google Self Driving Car, running an online lecture series on machine learning.

So where does this leave the career teacher – the person who leaves school, does a PGCE and then heads straight into the classroom without any intermediate industrial experience?

Well, fortunately, curriculum based subjects have the advantage of having a fixed set of knowledge to teach. Rather than passing on their own experience, school teachers are employed to pass on the benefit of everyone else's, condensed into an agreed body of knowledge by the well respected techniques of group discussion and consensus. In addition, certain subjects require little filtering through the lens of experience. While it may take a lifetime of practice to know which lines an actor should project and which to deliver in a hushed yet audible whisper, there are few circumstances in which 2+2 doesn't equal 4, where Newton's laws are affected by the sense of our own gravity, or where years of dealing with timezones will place the Battle of Hastings at any other time than 1066.

That said, the older the student, the more they require a sense that they are being taught something that matters. I use algebra every day, and yet I despair when I hear adults complaining that the subjects they were taught at school are irrelevant to their adult life (although even I will admit to frustration at having learnt two foreign languages when everyone insists on speaking to me in English).

Maybe what real world experience gives us is not the knowledge to pass on, but the understanding of which pieces of that knowledge matter. Ultimately, all knowledge is valuable, but some is more applicable than others. Of the courses I remember from university, the ones I felt most worth studying turned out to be of largely academic interest, and the ones I slept through or ignored turned out, naturally, to contain the most vital information that I subsequently had relearn at my own time and expense.

In fact, when re-acquiring all of this information, I came to realise that what I had learnt most in my time at school and university was the ability to learn. When I was at school, I thought I could only learn what was in my text book, or written up on a blackboard. Now I find it hard to even watch a film, or have a conversation, without discovering something new.

Maybe, what makes a good teacher, then, is not knowledge, or experience, or even charisma, although all these things are valuable. Maybe, what makes a great teacher, is the ability to inspire, to guide, and ultimately to allow you to discover for yourself. Maybe a good teacher is one who will lead you to the knowledge that the greatest teacher on the planet, ultimately, is you.