Garett Jones: commitment

Transcript context

…Finally, what is your advice to aspiring quality teachers? Have depth in the subject matter and find stories that you want to tell to enliven people. I always say this whenever I’m writing a teaching statement, which is, I feel like my job in the classroom is not to teach the details of any theory. My job is to give students a reason to feel passionate enough about the topic so that they’ll go home for two or three hours and study it on their own. My job is to then give them a few key pieces of advice, a few key pieces of information, a few key anecdotes or stylized facts, and a couple elements of deep theory that will stick in their heads so that those will work in their brain to inspire them to sit down for two or three hours on their own. I think that’s the real goal of teaching at the college level. It’s not that I will actually give them the full piece of information, the full body of knowledge in the classroom. It’s that I inspire them, motivate them to go read it and learn it and make the knowledge their own. Garett Jones, thank you very much. And again, the new book is 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. Thank you, Garett.…

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