Education Quote by Gail Godwin

Great teaching, Godwin suggests, is less a pious transfer of knowledge than a live performance staged under pressure. Calling it "one-fourth preparation" gives a nod to the unglamorous labor: lesson plans, mastery of material, anticipating misconceptions. But the real provocation is the "three-fourths pure theatre" - a phrase that refuses the comforting myth that expertise alone persuades. Theatre isn’t fakery here; it’s timing, voice, pacing, stakes. It’s the ability to make an idea feel present, not merely correct.

As a novelist, Godwin is attuned to what makes people keep turning pages: character, tension, revelation. Teaching, in her framing, runs on the same fuel. Students don’t learn just because information is true; they learn when attention is captured long enough for understanding to land. The subtext is slightly unsentimental: classrooms are arenas of competing stimuli, and the teacher who ignores that reality cedes the room to boredom. "Pure theatre" also implies improvisation - the best teachers read the crowd, revise in real time, and know when to lean into a moment.

There’s a quiet critique embedded here of educational cultures that treat charisma as suspect and performance as shallow. Godwin flips it: performance is pedagogy’s delivery system. Preparation is necessary, but without the practiced art of making meaning vivid, it stays inert - like a script no one wants to watch.