<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

Cepeda: An ode to the joy of inspired, and inspiring, teaching

By
Published:

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale and a former board member of the National Endowment for the Arts, made the following bold statement in response to a student’s wondering about why anyone should give a hoot about Beethoven:

“You must know Beethoven’s music because no one has ever said anything deeper about what it means to be human, to look life and death in the eye, to know beauty at its purest and most intense — if you can take it. Because Beethoven asserts his own mere human self against the whole cosmos and makes it listen.”

Gelernter’s essay on why “Music Education Needs to be a Click Away” both shocked and heartened me. It, I realized, is an incisive example of what’s missing in education: passion. The deep scholarship, rock-solid understanding of a topic or discipline and the fanaticism, the ardor, to bring it to life for another human being.

I might not have made the connection had I not been in the middle of professor Robert Greenberg’s “Beethoven — His Life and Music,” one of his series of “The Great Courses” lectures on the German composer. Of the many books, movies, college music history classes and other explorations of Beethoven’s life I’ve consumed over the last 30 years, I can’t recall enjoying any other as much as Greenberg’s telling.

Greenberg’s wealth of knowledge about Beethoven — from the vicious beatings he endured as a child to his inability to find love, his crazy, lead-filled hair, slovenly appearance, haughtiness, monstrous overprotectiveness of his nephew and total klutziness — comes through in every word of his animated lecture.

Though I’m listening to the course as an audiobook, I feel as though Greenberg is reaching through my headphones and shaking me by the shoulders with his desperate need to tell the tragic story of one of the most gifted musicians who ever lived.

Similarly, Gelernter’s poetic take on Beethoven leaped up and seized me. Ostensibly an essay about how technology could and should enable learners as young as first grade to experience the timeless beauty of Beethoven, Gelernter ends up illustrating that no app or music service could ever entice a learner as much as just a small taste of a passionate advocate’s love for his or her subject.

In his piece, Gelernter does not provide a politically correct, sanitized, trigger-warning statement of fact about why anyone should be interested in a revered composer. He states unequivocally that Beethoven “addresses God face-to-face, like Moses, whether God listens or not. And so people all over the world study and listen to and perform his music with reverence.”

The passion of learning

This adoration, this chest-thumping awe for a subject is what creates lifelong learners. This dynamism about a topic — really, any topic — so enthusiastically passed on to a student is what makes education life-altering. Its absence is often what can make learning so painfully boring.

Yes, we must harness the power of technology to deliver the wonderment and awe of any number of worthy and important subjects to people who can’t even imagine why it might be worthwhile to do so. But let us not undervalue the influence of an inspiring teacher.

Surely Gelernter’s student at Yale was swayed by his professor’s evangelical fervor for Beethoven and will take something of the great composer’s life with him on his future travels.

But in addition to nifty tech tools for spreading worthwhile information, what education really needs more of are experts who are able to spread their zeal to those who aren’t aware that learning, even when it’s hard work, can be such great fun.

Loading...