Pepperdine professor’s book is hailed by the National Education Association.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
As one of Pepperdine University’s top leaders in the field of teacher education, professor Michael Gose, in his book, “What it Means to be a Teacher” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc), attempts to illustrate the elusive, connective bond between student and teacher.
“Teachers are underappreciated and, of course, underpaid,” Gose said in an interview with The Malibu Times. “But everyone has the teacher who, while I might have found him boring, will have students come back and say he changed their lives.”
Going against the grain is something Gose champions in teaching.
“There is a hidden curriculum in teaching that we don’t always like to acknowledge,” he said. “We don’t always write lesson plans and, at the top 10 schools in the country, there is a premium placed on challenging authority.”
Challenging authority, however, Gose said, is sadly lacking at most schools that serve middle class students, which are designed to herd students forward rather than nurture intellectual curiosity.
“Look at No Child Left Behind,” Gose said in describing the results of President Bush’s signature national education policy that has been criticized for “teaching to the test” rather than teaching a comprehensive approach to academics. “It sounds great. Who can disagree with the concept? But we have a 30 percent dropout rate in public high schools. It puts a lot of pressure on marginal students.”
As recounted in his book, Gose’s goal is to reach all students at whatever level they come in.
“Effective teaching is not always found in a book; it evolves,” he said. “Marshall McLuhan said he didn’t know who discovered water, but it sure wasn’t the fish.”
Gose was a Navy brat who attended 13 schools before graduation. Out of all his teachers, he says he is most indebted to two who taught advanced placement English and history at Mission Bay High School in San Diego.
“Alice Coleman and John Daley,” he said. “For two years they doggedly insisted we accept their standards, not the school’s written standards. They pitted their wills against 35 adolescents in class every day, and they won. I learned to challenge the canon.”
Most books on education celebrate the dedicated teacher who has “no other life,” Gose, who has taught at Pepperdine since 1980, said. “But my book is for the rank and file who are never recognized.”
Accordingly, Gose recounts in “What it Means to be a Teacher” his own successes, such as Bob, the teenager seemingly determined to dropout before graduation, until Gose personally dragged him out of bed every morning at 5:30 a.m. to make sure he got to class.
Gose doesn’t spare himself the stories of his failures, such as walking into the trap of reading nursery rhymes aloud to a class of adolescents. In the middle of Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” he realized he couldn’t escape the middle stanza and blushed while reciting to a bunch of sniggering 15-year-olds, “What a beautiful pussy you are, you are, what a beautiful pussy you are.”
Ruefully observing that research has shown it is not unusual for a teacher to have to make twelve hundred judgments in a classroom day, Gose quoted one of his student teachers, “You are never prepared for the amount of failure you experience as a teacher.”
Such accounts have drawn high praise from NEA Today, the monthly periodical published by the National Education Association. In his foreword to the book, NEA executive director Don Cameron writes, “In this excellent book… Gose clearly and cleverly conveys to the reader what every good teachers knows: that a meaningful learning experience for the student is also a meaningful learning experience for the teacher.”
Gose’s fervor for the educational process has yielded some enthusiastic adherents over the years.
Tanja Carter is a Pepperdine graduate who now teaches at El Camino College and counts Gose, to this day, as one of her best friends.
“Mike’s courses were always very interactive,” Carter said. “He never lectured. It was always a very Socratic method with lots of games and activities. He doesn’t call himself a teacher. He’s a facilitator, and he set me on that path.”
Charlie Park, now an assistant principal in the Pasadena Unified School District, is a former student who remembers an honors program at Pepperdine that Gose directed.
“He recruited about 35 freshmen on his own with the idea that we would graduate in three years,” Park said. “He really pushed us. We went to London to study British history and we all graduated early.”
Park said Gose’s method was “all about inspiration and motivation,” and that his mentoring was project-oriented, rather than pedantic.
“One kid wrote a play on Van Gogh and another student’s project was to write a fiction novel,” Park remembered. “Another student was visually oriented, so he designed an art gallery.”
Park attributes his own career in academia to Gose’s example.
“His emphasis was always on his relationship with his students, and nurturing their lifestyle skills. Even in a class of 200 people, he’d remember everyone’s name. It was always about the process of learning, no matter what subject. Michael Gose was quite the maverick.”
Michael Gose’s book, “What it Means to be a Teacher” can be found online at www.rowmanlittlefield.com