For teaching is a gift to impart, A dance of the mind, a song from the heart.

Dear all,

Catching up on LinkedIn, I saw Karen Jean-Francois' post about how she remembers that I told her I often volunteer to teach a new subject when I want to learn it.

It brought me back to teaching, which I love, and which has been the main driver in my career.

So, why do I love it so much, despite the challenges that come with it? I explained it to ChatGPT and asked it to write a silly poem around it. Ha! It came up with a lot of nonsense and one verse that hit the spot just right.

For teaching, she believes, is a gift to impart,

A dance of the mind, a song from the heart.

I love the song of the heart. Teaching is about helping, about caring, about serving. And it is a privilege to be able to do so.

The reason I volunteer to teach a new subject when I want to learn it, is the dance of the mind.

A dance of the mind

In academia, research and teaching often do not live side-by-side. We are typically evaluated on our research and teaching accomplishments separately. The weight put on these evaluations for promotion decisions is usually different. At universities that have a strong research mission, teaching is also undervalued. Certainly in my career, the strong emphasis was always on the research. It's a real shame that this happens: it goes against the educational mission of the university (and isn't that, in essence, the main mission of any institute of higher education), and it can also lead to the mindset that research and teaching are two separate endeavors of the mind. I don't believe that.

Teaching and research are closely linked. An obvious link is that being a research supervisor and mentor to your graduate students is a form of teaching. There are other strong connections.

Research requires you to gain, through experimentation, through dialogue, through synthesis, a deep understanding of a topic, which can then lead to innovation. Teaching seeks to impart an understanding of a topic to others. Both endeavors have in common that deeper knowledge and understanding are sought through dialogue. In teaching, there may be an attitude in the teacher (or the university) that the understanding imparted is only to students. In my experience, it is absolutely not. I lost track of the number of times I had aha moments in my classes. Even after teaching matrix computations to beginning graduate students for 25 years, for example, I would still discover nuance and deeper connections between parts of that material that I have seemingly mastered for several decades. That is one of the beautiful dances of the mind while teaching.

Similar aha moments may occur when trying to explain a research topic or problem to your collaborators or at a conference. By simply putting thoughts into words and communicating these to others, right then and there, your own understanding of the material can improve leaps and bounds.

I've always wondered what it is in our brains that make us gain such deeper understanding by communicating. It's not that students ask specific questions that directly lead to these deeper insights. The insights may simply come when I'm explaining an algorithm on the board, or describing a topic, and out of the blue my brain makes connections with other parts of the material or other parts of my knowledge that I had not realized consciously before. I think it has a lot to do with the intensity that comes with teaching. You are in the zone, you are concentrating, you may have adrenaline streaming through your veins. Your brain is zooming along.

It always makes me happy (I love learning), and colleagues or students may notice as I, whoosh, go off on some Margot tangent when it happens, excited about the new connection, maybe loosing everyone in the process as I'm still trying to really understand what my brain is telling me.

It's these kinds of new insights that I think of when I think of a Dance of the Mind. I strongly believe that without teaching, my own research accomplishments would have been lower. These mind dances have helped me be more agile in my thinking. And besides that, it's freakin awesome when it happens.

So, this is really why I volunteer to teach a topic when I need to understand it. I know that by trying to explain things to others, the insights that may not have been there even the night before will likely come faster and more furiously.

It's scary at times though, to throw yourself in front of a group, feeling that you barely know more than they do. But heck, then the adrenaline kicks in even more!

#teaching # research #academia