OK I've been thinking about this all night: here's something for philo teachers to learn from Bob Ross:

Bob Ross is about transmitting a sense of possibility and ability, rather than about a punishing sense of failure and difficulty. https://twitter.com/add_hawk/status/1283933523569790981

I think a lot of philosophy teaching radiates the brilliance of the philosopher studied, and the brilliance of the professor themselves, and oriented towards constantly emphasizing how hard reasoning is, and how many errors the student can make.

And it's true: a reasoning is incredibly hard, and students make lots of mistakes. But, and I think this is the Bob Ross Way: maybe the best way to teach students is not to hit them over the head constantly with their mistakes.

Following Bob Ross: a form of pedagogy is to place a usable technique in the student's hand, designed to show them *how much* they can do with something simple, and then let them try it out. It is to make to try to transmit excitement and sensitivity.

As @SaraLUckelman points out, too, it's crucial that Bob Ross techniques are actually usable and basically work. If you go try it, you get something recognizable as the same result. https://diaryofdoctorlogic.wordpress.com/2020/05/27/bob-ross-and-the-art-of-learning-online/

I learned to draw from The Natural Way to Draw, which is similar. Instead of a narrow sense of correctness, and the possibility of mistake, it let you explore with a sequenced set of marvelous exercises. But it worked because he'd picked exactly the right exercises.

The philosophy equivalent of this is, I guess: to not present the Most Important arguments and beat up the students when they don't get it, but to find the right-size, simple techniques for them to enjoy practicing. Right-sized enough that they can notice when they screw it up.

When I was a food reviewer in LA, my hero was, of course, Jonathan Gold. But after a while, I started noticing something I disliked about his writing. It always radiated his own special brilliance, his secret connections you didn't have. It encouraged people to be followers.

A very different kind of food writing is emphasize the possibility that *anybody* could find good stuff, if you just tried. That's what Bob Ross does. And that's probably what we should be doing in the classroom.