After 30 Years, Gentile Remains Passionate About Teaching

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Although he's been in the business for 30 years, Ronald J. Gentile still can recall an experience in class during the 1970s that changed his philosophy about teaching.

"I was teaching a large class, lecturing on some ridiculous topic," Gentile says. "Some (students) were eating, knitting, sleeping, paying attention, and it occurred to me that this was not going the way I wanted."

He cut the class short. "Next time," he told the class, "I will lecture because I want to say it, not because you need to know it."

From then on, he says, he never lectured -- in the conventional sense -- again. "I'm never boring any more because I'm excited about it," he says. "That's made life more tolerable for me and my students."

Gentile, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology in the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education, remains passionate about his work after three decades in the field. The philosophy he shares with his students is simple: "Each of us has to be humble. We're never done learning how to teach."

Gentile, who says he always wanted to teach, started out in chemical engineering at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. He soon figured out engineering wasn't for him, and enrolled at Pennsylvania State University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in psychology. After completing his doctoral work, he narrowly missed going to Vietnam: the ROTC graduate instead was nominated by his professor to do research for the U.S. Army at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. In 1969, after two years at the hospital, Gentile came to UB.

Since then, the Amherst resident has been working on inspiring in his students the same passion he has for education, particularly in his "Psychology of Learning and Instruction" class.

"That's my fun class," he says. "I've taught that class for all 30 years I've been here." He even wrote his own text for the graduate-level class "Educational Psychology."

Gentile says he teaches his students that they "have to make sure (their students) achieve the critical objectives…to go to the next level."

But this is easier said than done, he acknowledges.

"We are too dominated by test scores," he says. "Everybody seems to know what the one 'right' way is, (but) there are a zillion 'right' ways."

Keeping an open mind about teaching methods is key, Gentile notes. In math, for example, students should be taught multiple ways to solve a problem.

"We want to teach kids to think, not memorize," he says. "If we don't do this now, two years from now, kids are going to be in worse shape."

Gentile, who has spent years studying mastery learning and other methods of teaching and testing, earned the rank of SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor about a year ago.

"It's a fantastic honor," he says. "It carries with it an awesome responsibility -- I better teach well, I better relate well to students. I think I always have."

His enthusiasm stems, in part, from a constant reflection on what matters: Why are teachers doing what they're doing? What can we do differently to help students achieve greater success?

"I feel emotionally involved in it. I never get tired of it," he says, comparing the experience of teaching to that of "listening to good music."

Music has played a large part in Gentile's educational philosophy. Though not a substitute for the curriculum itself, he points out that music can be a great learning tool in almost any subject. He and his wife, Kay, who teaches at Buffalo State College, have collaborated on several projects.

"We wrote a whole lot of (songs) that have to do with overcoming (adversity) and cooperation," he says. "Most of it can be used to teach a lesson."

A moral lesson, that is. "Flash the Firefly" is a song about environmental issues, while "Buglebird Blues" tells the tale of a trumpeter swan who is rejected by friends, but ultimately saves them. "The Great Horse and The Greater Horses," which was performed as a children's opera in the area, is about helping one another in the face of adversity.

And overcoming adversity has much to do with success. On Gentile's first day of class at Drexel, his instructor told each student to look to his left, then his right. "Only one of you will be left at the end of the year," Gentile recalls the instructor saying. It is something on which he continues to reflect.

"Why do we have an education system that says only one of three of you will be here at the end of the year?" he asks.

Students -- in his classroom and in his students' classrooms -- have to believe they can accomplish almost anything.

"If a teacher can't get excited about something, how can the students?" he wonders. "I think that's one of the reasons I'm not sick of this after 30 years."