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Monday, January 29, 2007
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UD's Latter-Day Love of Teaching Second Part Gradually, over a number of years, I noticed that teaching was more and more often a pleasure. I'd walk back to my office, after a discussion of some novel or short story or poem, buzzing. My extremities tingled. My brain sparkled. I replayed in my head funny or challenging things students had said. Students weren't abstractions now; they were intellectually and emotionally receptive people whom I found moving. Part of it I think was simply that I got older -- far enough away from my students that their intensities were at once familiar, an occasion of wistfulness, and objectively fascinating. I could see with some clarity what preoccupied them, and how the literature we read played into those preoccupations. But I could also see them breaking away from their preoccupations, engrossed in the selfless pleasure of aesthetic experience and analysis; and I knew that when this happened I was witnessing actual, real-time education. Part of it was my own growing clarity about the books and the range of ideas I loved. I saw that I offered a modernist sensibility - a delight in complex and beautiful language, an admiration for the philosophical seriousness of this sort of literature, a conviction that difficulty was a hallmark of valuable art and thought. And of course part of it was practice. I'd been at this for a couple of decades; it was time I began to figure out how to do it. |