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Monday, January 29, 2007
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How UD, Late in the Day, Came to Love Teaching Part The First I began like most Ph.D.'s, tossed in front of podiums with no training. I seem to recall having been a teaching assistant in a seminar (on William Blake?), but I don't think I learned anything from it. I'm grateful for that thrownness-into-teaching. Most forms of teacher training are stupid and degrading. They convey bogus information, and they make you self-conscious about what you're doing. I never disliked teaching, but like a lot of academics I thought of myself as a writer and researcher first, a teacher second. As everyone knows, the rewards in most of academia lie in publishing. Virtually none involve teaching. Showing too much facility and pleasure in the teaching line can cost you tenure. If I were a student paying a lot of money for my degree and serious about my studies, I'd be insulted to realize that the largest incentive offered my professors by the university was less and less teaching, less and less need to deal with students in any way. I'd be irritated that some of my professors' most profound emotions through their teaching careers -- fear, envy, pride, disdain -- revolved around their and their colleagues' teaching loads. How often have I heard a professor say of a recent high-profile appointment at some university And she only has to teach two courses a year... Nirvana, for many professors, at least at research universities, is never having to teach. Although everything in the ethos of the professors' world I'd entered taught me to loathe teaching, to regard it as a kind of embarrassment, I never did. As I say, I never even disliked it. I was, in my first years, rather nervous before each class - could feel my heart beating. I'd rifle through my notes, fingers atremble. The students were abstractions to me, a set of challenges to overcome: get their attention, deal with distracting behavior, impress the following five points upon them... Still, the teaching thing was okay. I'd grown up in a noisy happy house full of verbal types, so standing there talking away was fine... Yet I never loved it. The occasional class session when everything hummed along was of course exhilarating. But that was occasional. I came to understand why, no matter what they say about it, many professors detest teaching. It's hard. Each class, if you take the business of teaching at all seriously, represents a significant and somewhat draining emotional experience. You've got to be up for every fifty minute or so session - to be alert, responsive, provocative, substantive. You've got to deal with a number of dispiriting possibilities: no response from students, hostility from them, indifference to your subject matter (your subject matter may mean an enormous amount to you, making it hurtful to confront indifference to it), a lack of comprehension, an unwillingness to try to comprehend, and so forth. Somehow you have to evolve the ability and the energy to create a focused and reflective group of people two or three times a week, a group of people who (if you're a literature professor) have willingly read a challenging novel or set of poems, and have something to say about them. A group of people who intuit after awhile the nature and value of the approach to literature you're proposing throughout the semester, and who question it intelligently. There will be resistance to this, or there will be disappointing levels of knowledge and competence. Because you really put yourself out there, and because a bad class session can end with your feeling both aggrieved and exhausted, teaching is humbling. From humbling it can tumble down to humiliating. The larger your self-importance -- university professors are notorious for a certain anxious, unsteady self-regard -- the more you're liable to hate teaching. The professional world venerates you. The pishers in Room 12 C think you bite the big one. MacArthur says you're a genius. Miss Nose Ring blows you off as a jerk... |