The deep thrill of teaching

"I have projected a process of choice and shape as if teaching were really what the ancients and their Renaissance emulators said it was, a sculpting process, whereby the clay or stone or wax, inorganic material but malleable, could, through choices, be made to take a shape that nature never saw, a shape art supplies to the stuff the world provides. While I do not think teaching is as painless or effortless as I may have made it sound, I do believe it is essentially the ethical and aesthetic activity I propose. I do believe that it involves the making and setting of right and wrong choices in the interests of a larger, shaping process and that the deep thrill a teacher can experience comes from the combination of these activities, so that you feel what you think, do what you talk about, judge as you talk about judgment, proceed logically as you reveal logical structure, clarify as you talk about clarity, reveal as you show what nature reveals-all in the service of encouraging the student in imitation and then repetition of the process you have been summoning, all so that the student may turn himself not into you but into himself. - - A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI, A Free and Ordered Space"

"BART: A Life of A. Bartlett Giamatti" by Anthony Valerio, Robert Brower: https://a.co/8bbPUDD