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Show DR. JACK ADAMSON: "I continually find myself torn in two directions. Now when I'm working with graduates I have the feeling that I would like to take amateurs and turn them into professionals. I'm tugged the other way when I teach the freshmen as I always do in the honors section, because now you have a wholly different kind of ballgame, and I don't know that one is any more rewarding than the other. I merely know it's a different kind of thing that you have to do. The teacher has to explain things that to him might seem fairly ordinary and rather easy but he constantly has to make this effort to remember what it was like when he was eighteen years old, and this isn't always the easiest thing in the world. I really do think that a sensitive teacher ultimately can feel indifference. I think he can feel hostility and I think he can feel interest. When you feel that indifference, that's the worst. Hostility can always be changed but indifference-that's the deadly one." 312 DR. ELLEN CROOKS: I have a pet phrase that I use with my college students and that is that enthusiasm is caught and not taught. If these people (elementary education students) are going to be teachers, as we hope they will be, I think they have to be enthusiastic about it, and if I'm going to be a teacher I've got to show some enthusiasm to them. Sense of humor-probably we laugh more in the classes that I teach than any other thing that happens. But it's a release, and I think also that this gives each individual some personal value and worth. When you work with little people-I'm talking about primary and intermediate grade children, including kindergarten-you have to give so much of yourself to involve these little people, and the same thing happens in the college. We have to give so much of ourselves to involve them, and as many experiences as we can have the more value and the more interest we can have in each other. I tell the college students, if they don't like people and you don't have an interest in human relations the probability is that you wouldn't be doing a good job. Yes, I'd teach for nothing." DR. STANLEY JENCKS: I wont go into all the details, but I train discussion leaders in the techniques of question asking in mathematics. It works out very, very well. We meet during lunch hour or sometime outside of class with one representative from each group and...spend a lot of emphasis on what's going on rather than on the responses as such, the answers. This seems to give the people confidence in their own thinking. Very oddly I have a joint appointment also teaching education and teaching people to teach mathematics in addition. I'm working on a new idea I think is going to work very well. I've got a series of films showing good interaction between child and teacher, and suggesting a lot of ideas for the people to try. I take half the class at the university, with one of the members of the group acting as an assistant and discussion leader, and the other half goes to school with me and the next session, the half that were in watching the film will go to the school and try out the ideas they saw in the film, actually interacting with children, while I walk around listening to each group, make notes, then return to my office and dictate a letter to each one indicating the things that I saw that were exemplary." |