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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Part Three:
UD Discovers She Loves To Teach



Tony Grafton, in a comment about my In Her Latter-Days UD Discovers She Loves to Teach series, talks about teaching's "immense rewards." One's love of teaching obviously lies in those rewards, yet it's hard to talk about them without sounding sappy or grandiose or self-serving.

Or presumptuous. My literature class rewards may share nothing with your astronomy class rewards. Maybe we both experience the I'm successfully conveying information and ideas and even a sort of intellectual ethos to a number of the people sitting in front of me reward, and that's a biggie. But there's more.

For me, it has to do with being given glimpses of unguarded humanity. Students tend to be blithely, surpassingly, curious. Their faces as I lecture on (to take an example from today's teaching) James Joyce's story, "The Dead" are open and avid; you can see their brains churning ... Some of them, I can tell, are preparing to challenge my interpretations ("Why are we dumping on Gabriel Conroy's after-dinner speech?" asked one. "It's a model of its kind."); others are scanning a page of the story for examples of figures of speech to add to those I've mentioned; yet others simply gaze at me in a relaxed, pensive way.

This last group can be very quiet, class after class, just looking and listening. When, eventually, one of them, from the back row, raises a tentative hand and comes out with something rather profound, it's an enormous pleasure.

This is unguarded, unencumbered humanity, learning its way more deeply into life. I get to be present at the birth of some of this learning. At least that's how it sometimes feels. And that feeling is a spectacular reward.