Today, by utter serendipity, I learned that yet a third member of the La Crosse Area Beekeepers is a retired teacher. But what really surprised me was the fact that I was actually surprised to learn that. Particularly after the person in question had just presented a topic to the group last month.
See, when someone gives a presentation to her/his peers without crashing through a prepared script, I take it as a sort of baseline standard. Most likely because being on the high school and college speech & debate teams pretty much warped my standard of "normal" from the get-go. But as much as that seems to be a hallmark of someone who has spent all or part of her/his career at the front of a classroom, it doesn't necessarily tell the full story.
Because along with the presentation skills seems to run a willingness to answer questions in stride, to say "I don't know, but I can probably find out," a talent for organizing material for maximum absorption, and (so often) the passion for the subject at hand. Those, IMLTHO, are the hallmarks of a true teacher. Not all of these spent time in Academe, certainly. But in my experience, it's a rare non-professional teacher who has the complete set.
If Alvin Toffler is correct in saying that, "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and re-learn," we--as a society and a world--cannot do without strong teaching skills. (Inside a formal classroom or not--it's all the same.) Understand that I'm not under-rating auto-didacticism; I just think that, in most cases, it's a highly inefficient way of scrambling up the crucial--and often steep--first part of the learning-curve.
