Pull Back the Curtain - The Magic of Teaching

First, a confession - I love stage magicians.  I grew up in the days when David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear and was in high school when he went over Niagra Falls.  I am rooting for Eric Chen to make it far in this season of America's Got Talent.  I loved Harry Anderson but am not a fan of David Blaine.

Among my favorites are Penn and Teller.  I enjoy them, and not only because Penn Gillette is incredibly smart and Teller's facial expressions remind me of Red Skelton.  (He does talk, by the way.  I heard him interviewed on NPR.)  I love that they are willing to reveal a bit about how their tricks work.  They don't violate magician rules because they don't tell you everything, but they reveal just enough to keep you intrigued and raise your respect for the craft.  On Fool Us, other magicians perform for them in the hopes of doing something Penn and Teller won't know.  In order to tell them whether or not they were fooled, Penn speaks in allusions and code, just enough so the contestant will know that they got it (and they are super supportive of these young magicians whether they have fooled them or not).  As a viewer, I don't understand much of what they are saying, but it is fun seeing them recognize each other's skills.

I think it is important to sometimes take a Penn and Teller approach to teaching.  When appropriate, we should tell students why we write questions the way that we do or what certain techniques are doing for their brains.  When you are using priming, it helps them to know how that makes the rest of what you are going to do that day stick better.  When asking them to put words in categories, they are likely to think it is busy work if you don't reveal that their brains love to categorize in order to compare and contrast.  My 8th-grade students sometimes think any question that makes them think is a "trick" question, but when I show them Bloom's taxonomy, there are less likely to believe i am doing something to them rather than for them.

You can't tell them everything because some things only work if they aren't conscious of the effect.  However, sharing a little of our craft will let students know that we make choices out of professional judgment, not by accident.  They will appreciate good teaching when they see it again and will find out things about their own brain that they can apply to other learning.  Unlike a magician, whose goal is to entertain, our goal is life-long learning.  We have to pull back the curtain enough that they can teach themselves when we aren't around.