This sentence from Louis Menand’s review of The Program Era — its author, Mark McGurl, sent a copy to UD, and she’s just finished reading the introduction — made her stop and think about the wired classroom, distance learning, PowerPoint, the whole bit.

Since few undergraduate students know what they aspire to be, almost all of their teachers are potential models.   And their teachers may not be professional models (Menand’s talking in particular about students who want to be writers); they may be ethical models, or models of scholarly practice, or whatever.

The larger point is that, as Menand’s comment suggests, teachers are intense figures in students’ lives.  Or they should be.  Students READ them, says Menand.  Closely.

Which UD, after twenty-five years of teaching, can confirm.  There are always several students who look at you with particular intensity.  That look is not merely about their intellectual alertness, their fascination with what you’re presenting by way of ideas; it’s also about a naked appraisal of you, the professor, as an entire human package.  What the hell are you?  What do you stand for?  How did you get where you are?  Why do you care so much about your subject?  Why should the student care?

Any professor who takes the time to look at students looking at her knows what I’m talking about.  Especially if you’re teaching literature, you’re exposed.  No getting around it.  Your subject is intense human experience intensely rendered.  Sometimes, reading a poem aloud, you surprise yourself with tears.  The students look.  They see your tears, or they see your struggle to suppress them.  Students see a lot of things.  Root around in Rate My Professors for awhile, and you’ll see remarkably lucid and perceptive takes on professors as human beings.  There’s a maturity and depth to these descriptions that you only get after a semester’s worth of staring fixedly at another human being, listening to her talk to you, reflecting on the subtle connections between her primal human experience and the advanced academic subject to which she has been drawn.

Menand’s comment tells us what we all know — The most valuable, the most profound education, emerges out of the complex, evolved human encounter of the classroom.  Because for all that you’re looking at me, I’m looking at you, kid.  My speculative heart’s going out to you.  Especially when you’re writing your in-class final and I can stop talking and start looking, you’d better believe I’m scanning for all I’m worth.  It goes both ways.  What are you?  Where do you come from?  Do your parents love you?  When you responded to that short story with such vehemence, some of it directed at me — Do you know that I loved that?  That I’ll never forget that?  Do you know that above all I want you to be passionate?

Well.  I could go on.  I only wanted to say that if you want to gut this experience entirely, if you want to carve out the heart of it, you hide the pages of your teacher-book behind PowerPoints; you hide the pages of your student-book — a book I find very moving — behind your computer screen.

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In his review of McGurl’s book, Menand describes the nature of minimalist and maximalist fiction writing:

The form of a Carver short story—ostentatiously brief, emotionally hyper-defended—expresses something. McGurl thinks that the style represents the “aestheticization of shame, a mode of self-retraction.” Literary minimalism like Carver’s—McGurl calls it “lower-middle-class modernism”—is a means of reducing the risk of embarrassing oneself, and is one way that students from working-class backgrounds, like Carver (he was from Oregon, where his father was a sawmill worker), deal with the highbrow world of the academy.  … McGurl thinks that maximalism, too, is “a way of shielding oneself with words.”

This plain affectless style carries over easily into the classroom, where we’re all ever so defended and hard.  (Of course, when they’re not being strong and affectless, Carver’s characters are drinking themselves to death.)  And the preference for non-expressivity — a preference all the wired additions to the classroom play to beautifully — is not class-based.  The same self-shielding (for different reasons maybe) happens among upper-class students.  Read Walter Kirn’s descriptions of Princeton University classrooms.

So now the book the student used to try so hard to read slams itself shut.  The book the teacher tried so hard to read withdraws behind a screen.