On Trying to Teach: The Mind in Correspondence

In an era in which the teaching enterprise is freighted with tactics, techniques, and methods, M. Robert Gardner guides us back to the spirit of teaching. He writes especially about the dilemmas and challenges of teaching, about how it feels to be trying to teach. A clinical teacher of psychiatry and psychoanalysis for over four decades, Gardner is both enlightening and entertaining in relating his own teacherly struggles, including his efforts to harness the teacher's ever-present furor to teach" and thence to discern and engage his students' "hidden questions." Written in simple but evocative prose, On Trying to Teach is a wonderful companion volume to Self Inquiry (1983). In the earlier work, Gardner explored the play between patient and analyst; now, in the same gracefully self-reflective voice, he turns to the play between student and teacher. Gardner's provocative, often iconoclastic musings will goad teachers of all subjects to reflect anew on their calling, on what exactly it means to teach. Analysts and other clinical readers will take special pleasure in the humane psychoanalytic sensibility that not only infuses Gardner's own teaching, but shapes his approach to the most basic questions about teaching and learning in general.