Chun King; or Teaching and the Meta

Teaching is a divided sort of profession.  It's a dangerous condition, or at least one that can be deeply ensnaring, leading to a sort of mental bifurcation or even schizoid state. 

Good teachers, I would bet, find a good balance between content and metacontent, between the subject knowledge they teach and the way they teach that subject knowledge, between thinking about subject and thinking about the learning process. 

I know why I got into teaching: because of the ideas I get to think about.  In this I am not different from many--perhaps even most--teachers.  Because this is my orientation, the way I desire to set up a class is this:  Hmm, these are the works (poems, stories, novels) I want to talk about; we'll read them in this order and talk about them; I'll walk into class and say, "So what did you think?"; then we'll talk about them; the end. 

Then comes the meta.  The above "process," if one could even call it a process, is no doubt "teacher-centered."  It doesn't take into account at what level students are reading, whether they have the vocabulary to discuss a given work, whether they've been introduced to the ideas of the work or are encountering them for the first time, etc. 

Thus, a teacher must enter the kingdom of Chun King: the land where teachers break down, even in the study of literature, the smaller chunks that students need to be able to build toward the biggest ideas, the higher level mental processes that will illustrate true learning.  The meta.

I would prefer never to leave the land of content for the kingdom of Chun King.  I'm tempted to say one can get lost in the kingdom of Chun King, that one can spend so much time considering the Meta as to lose sight of the palace of content there on the hill in the distance, though I know this most often false.  Some of the best humanities teachers I've had keep their Chun King forays to a very few practices--creating an inviting classroom, asking good questions, making much of mundane or even lacking student answers, all the while leading the class toward the higher content ideas.  Some of the panic over online teaching no doubt results from the fears that suddenly because of the new medium we will get lost in Chun King.

"Chunking" content is the most blessed of teaching words I've ever learned.  It's a way to talk about the Meta of teaching without making it feel like a teacher must get lost in the kingdom of Chun King.  Of course we're going to break this gourmet meal down into chunks; it can't go down whole.  However, when you're a teacher who is in love with the content that's exactly what you want to jump to--to after meal discussion rather than enjoying every bite along the way.