{"id":116,"date":"2020-04-20T09:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gooroo.com\/blog\/?p=116"},"modified":"2020-04-21T17:11:18","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T21:11:18","slug":"the-best-advice-i-got-from-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gooroo.com\/blog\/the-best-advice-i-got-from-teachers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Advice I Got From Teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Now that I\u2019m a newly minted college graduate out in the big wide world, I\u2019ve noticed the voices of my teachers knocking at the ear of my mind more often than before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Advice<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It makes sense that this would happen. While I was in school, my teachers\u2019 advice felt important for the successful completion of individual assignments, but not so much for the development of a personal ethic, a scaffold to build a life by. Now that I\u2019ve left, life looks wider and less structured, and decisions about the kind of life I want to lead need to be made. So, I want to share the best advice I got from teachers with you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developing a worldview<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In my junior year of college, in the midst of global confusion and a national inability to bridge ideological distances, I paid a visit to my sociology professor. He was going on 80 but energetic as a horse. I\u2019d always admired his intellectual confidence, a kind of certainty about how the world works. I asked him: \u201cHow do you develop a consistent world view?\u201d He smiled and said: \u201cSpend your youth in uncertainty. Relish it. Test out all kinds of ideas against experience and be ready to change your mind. Then, when you\u2019re older, you\u2019ll be fit to make decisions with the assurance that you\u2019ve learned the world well enough to navigate it, and maybe even to change it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Limiting blind spots<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of the great obstacles our age faces is ideological entrenchment. Politically biased educators, writers, and positive feedback loops on social media create the well-known bubbles of discourse that keep us reliant on the same ideas. So much so, that we\u2019ll avoid reading or listening to those we profoundly disagree with, often on grounds of moral righteousness. An English teacher<\/a> of mine, fed up with this pattern, would shout from time to time his best advice: \u201cRead Everything!\u201d High and low, left and right, sane and mad. Read it all. If an idea scares you so much that you refuse to listen to it, you\u2019re admitting that it\u2019s powerful enough to spread. If that\u2019s the case, the best thing you can do to defeat a dangerous idea is to hear it, learn it, and measure your own ideas against it. Then, you learn to defeat it with a better one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Critical thinking<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When I asked her what she feared most about education these days, my theatre professor replied: people are losing their critical distance. In other words, pure emotion is taking good thinking hostage. Emotion is an essential partner in analysis, but it needs to be tempered with distance, a kind of detachment that isn\u2019t alienating, but that does allow for reason to enter in. The way we feel about a thing doesn\u2019t necessarily make it true. The way we think about a thing gets us closer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Persistence<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

School is hard. Life is harder. But the joys possible in each are immeasurable. An acting professor of mine, during especially difficult training exercises, would repeat his mantra: \u201cWork towards the difficulty\u201d. It works for all pursuits, I think. When you push through the limits of your present ability, you forge, by definition, new limits and improved ability. So, we shouldn\u2019t only accept the difficulty we meet in our work. We should seek it out, make friends with it, and steel ourselves against its pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being on time <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Maybe my favorite and best advice came from a high school football coach. Whenever a player arrived late, he\u2019d repeat without fail: \u201cPunctuality is the courtesy of Kings and Queens\u201d. Being on time is the easiest way to remind the people around you that you respect them. Even and especially for a king or queen, for a boss or mentor, for someone who doesn\u2019t need to be on time, being punctual is an acknowledgment that time is equally precious to all of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that I\u2019m a newly minted college graduate out in the big wide world, I\u2019ve noticed the voices of my teachers knocking at the ear of my mind more often than before. It makes sense that this would happen. While I was in school, my teachers\u2019 advice felt important for the successful completion of individual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":117,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,9],"tags":[11,12],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\t\n