Part One:
Beginning to Teach
"The
Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching"
"Lecturing:
Using a Much Maligned Method of Teaching"
"Teaching
by Lecture"
"On
Discussion Teaching"
 The
Profession of Teaching
"What
Little I Think I Know About Teaching"
"The
Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines"
The
College Curriculum
The
Academic Advisers
|
The Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching
Those who are about to make the transition from being students to being
teachers often have many questions and anxieties about the duties they
are about to perform. The first reading in this section is a lecture given
by Robert Ferguson, who was asked for the Chicago Teaching Program's spring
1987 workshop to provide some practical suggestions for those beginning
their careers as teachers. In response to this assignment, he offers a
series of commandments for beginning teachers, which he illustrates with
anecdotes about the kinds of problems that can arise when teachers forget
that their students do not simply absorb information passively. Rather,
as he so nicely illustrates, students actively interpret what they hear
and thus will, with surprising frequency, alternately puzzle and amuse
you with their reconstructions of what you have said.
The Nine and a Half Commandments of Good Teaching
Robert A. Ferguson
Our topic today is the nature of teaching practice, and I address you
as a teacher and not as a theorist of pedagogical methodologies. The following
observations come from a reasonable wealth of practical experience and
from the comments of a few colleagues who have been kind enough to share
their own thoughts in the two weeks that I have had to ruminate on the
subject.
My assumptions in addressing you are twofold: first, that you are essentially
new or beginning teachers; and second, that the subject of greatest mutual
concern is the discussion class. If you are personally more worried about
formal lecture techniques, some of my comments should still be useful—especially
if you pay some attention to the plan of what you are about to hear. In
any case, the whole purpose of the lecture is to reach toward effective
discussion. Education is always a matter of exchange.
Let me begin with an example from my first important teaching experience
as an instructor in an expository writing class with twenty freshmen.
At the time, I was a graduate student—one of perhaps thirty new instructors
in this very large course—and we were all given a small teaching
manual to help us get started. I don't remember the manual, but I have
a very vivid memory of one of my colleagues, a tall ex-Marine who, accustomed
to orders, followed the manual all too carefully in his first class. That
class had reduced a strong, self-confident, outgoing person to a mass
of trembling fears.
This is what happened. Apparently, the manual called for an instructor
to enter the first class with a common object from daily life and to dare
the class to define it. The exercise was supposed to lead into a spirited
discussion about the vagaries of language and the need for precision in
its use. Our ex-Marine was an athlete. He brought a tennis ball with him,
bounced it on the desk, and, following orders, dared his class to define
it. And from the back of the room had come, "It's a tennis ball. Now what's
next?" The timing, the poise, and, yes, the casual hostility of the remark
destroyed this new instructor's entire class plan. Later in the day, when
our conversation took place, he literally could not remember how he had
survived the rest of the hour.
I give you the story for two reasons. First, it is an excellent example
of every beginning teacher's nightmare. Your class plan has collapsed,
and you experience the derision of your charges in direct consequence.
You have been left with nothing to say and a great deal of time in which
to say it! You have lost the upper hand and fear that you can never retrieve
it. Most terrible of all, your knowledge has been dreadfully inadequate
to your needs. The incident literally embodies the question that you will
ask a hundred times a class in your first year of teaching, Am I running
out of material?
My second reason for giving you this example has to do with my innate
suspicion of teaching manuals, every one of which should be taken with
many grains of salt. A rigid application of rules in the volatile forum
of the classroom will inevitably fail. Another person's decent insight
quickly becomes an artificial constraint when applied too mechanically.
It should be clear to you then that my title, "The Nine and a Half Commandments
of Good Teaching," has its facetious side. The open-endedness of that
final half has other important meanings that we will get to later, but
it stands most immediately for incompleteness, lack of system, and the
knowledge that you must make your own rules based upon your own experience
instead of relying upon mine. On the other hand, I have seen—and
lived—your problem, so bear with me. Here is the first commandment.
1. Make the classroom your own.—In part this
means the Shakespearean homily, "To thine ownself be true." If you try
to present yourself as something that you are not, even your dullest student
will eventually see through the artifice and decide that you are a phony.
Of course, knowing oneself is a difficult business, but you can learn
a great deal while teaching if you give yourself the chance. Think rather
deliberately about your own character. Know your strengths and weaknesses.
Work on your weaknesses, but play to your strengths. If, for example,
you are a straightforward, earnest individual, don't try to be overly
witty in the classroom. At the same time, please don't forget humor; it
is one of your most creative teaching devices.
Not the least part of being true to yourself lies in admitting ignorance.
When a student asks you a question, and you do not know the answer—it
will happen occasionally—there is only one correct answer: "I don't
know." These are hard words to get out for a beginning teacher, but don't
underestimate the pedagogical usefulness of your own ignorance. Let me
suggest just two strategies among many: (1) outline the way in which one
might think about constructing an answer to the question, or (2) make
a mutual assignment (for yourself and the student who has asked the question)
out of finding the correct answer for the next class.
Of course, making the classroom one's own means much more than I have
just suggested. It does not mean imposing your own personality on your
students. The logical extreme of such obnoxiousness can be seen in Ionesco's
play, The Lesson, where the teacher ends up killing his student
because she fails to conform to his understanding of her. I do mean, however,
that you have to guide and, at times, control your class through the nature
of your own personality. There are a hundred different ways to do this,
and experimentation is the key. Making the classroom your own means creating
an atmosphere in which everyone, including yourself, is comfortably effective—an
atmosphere in which everyone is engaged and engaging. This goal is more
easily stated than accomplished, but you never want to lose sight of the
ideal.
2. Effort!—The second commandment can be given
in one word: effort, yours and theirs. If you are industrious, your students
will respect you. It is almost as simple as that, though I refer you back
to rule one above as a sometime qualification. So be industrious. This
characteristic is rarely a problem with beginning teachers. I raise it
now because the halls of academia are filled with lazy teachers and even
lazier students. Mark Twain is quite correct when he says that "the natural
inclination of the human being is toward rest." There is, I believe, no
substitute for continuous effort, even if you know your material
well. Teaching is work. Don't ever forget that. You are the source of
energy in your classroom. Now this may seem like an obvious comment, but
the point is more complicated than most people realize.
Your effort in preparation must be matched by a similar effort in preparation
from the other side of the desk. It is your responsibility, in other words,
to insure that your students prepare. They will sit back and expect you
to entertain them if you allow them to. But if you let this happen, there
will be long stretches of boredom for all concerned, and this will be
true even if you are an accomplished performer because that is all you
will be, a performer. Your mission is to make your students think. That
does not happen if they are simply relaxing. There should be no freeloaders
in your classroom. Students should be in class, they should be prepared,
and they should be expected to participate on a regular basis.
I sometimes think that the single greatest characteristic that we have
lost sight of in contemporary education is the value of the spoken word
in intellectual exchange. One of the reasons why some of you will have
difficulty as beginning teachers lies in the unfortunate fact that you
have never been expected to hold forth in a formal way in a classroom.
My rule of thumb in presenting this need to my students is as follows:
students should speak often enough in class that the act does not interrupt
their own flow of thought. Thus, if a relatively passive student spends
five minutes thinking about the form of a comment and then ten more worrying
about what has been said, that student has just missed one-third of your
class. Stress the formal skill of public address; it is one of the vital
skills a college student is supposed to master. To accomplish this goal
in a balanced way, I call on students in class. If you adopt this practice
in a regular and fair-minded way, your students will accept it as part
of the natural process of instruction and will not see it as a problem.
3. Remember the formal process of instruction.—The
third rule of good teaching is almost as obvious as the first two: remember
the formal process of instruction. The artificiality of the classroom
in the formal process of instruction leads you to do things that you would
not do in ordinary discourse. Prepare for this formality. It includes,
among other things, the careful, even labored attempt to achieve precision
in the formulation of questions. It also involves an unusual amount of
repetition of your points and of your students' points. (It is always
helpful here to remember the old adage of the BBC: tell them what you
are going to say, say it, and then tell them what you have said.) These
qualities would be tedious in regular social exchange, but they are vital
in the classroom. This formality extends, of course, to your class agenda.
Know what you mean to accomplish in every class. Your students should
know what you are doing and why you are doing it. They will be especially
interested in the details. They should know what is expected of them and
when—from day one in your class. They should know how you grade and
what the grade means to you.
The elements just listed are ones that beginning teachers usually remember
(with the possible exception of repetition). If anything, a new teacher
will overemphasize the formality of instruction at the expense of substance—sticking
too closely to an agenda, for example, at the expense of a more interesting
point in class. But there is one element of formality that new teachers
often fail to comprehend. I refer to the hierarchical nature of the relation
between teacher and student. That relation is unavoidably hierarchical
with all of the implications that this implies. Beginning teachers are
often still students themselves in another context, and the dimensions
of hierarchy often make them uncomfortable. Learn to work within it. Because
you have an institutional advantage—one that will at times fascinate
your charges—you also have a hundred ways for taking personal advantage
of your students. All are questionable, and at least a score of them are
completely unethical. This is not a lecture on teaching ethics, but you
should never forget that to take advantage of a student for your own physical
or intellectual pleasure is to be a traitor to your profession. Hierarchy
as such is neither a positive nor a negative ingredient, but I guarantee
you that it will operate in a negative fashion if you have not thought
of its implications. I remind you of Cicero's famous injunction: "The
authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to
learn."
4. Be aware of your students.—My fourth rule,
be aware of your students, sounds simple enough. The issue, however, has
many dimensions. We can start with the literal and work up. You cannot
hope for a substantive exchange with your students if you do not know
their names. This amounts to a near law of human nature: your knowledge
of the name is a primal signification of your interest; failure to know
is just the opposite. I actually take role before every class. I do it
not just to learn the names in a large class but to inform everyone of
that name. It is also an act of preparation. When you call role, you can
actually see your students sit up a little more carefully as they get
ready for the public participation that true membership entails.
A second level of awareness of your students has to do with the corporate
identity of your class. Here I refer to their own interaction and apparent
sense of place, to their likes and dislikes within the group. A hatred
between students in a class—this will happen—can be a peculiarly
corrosive phenomenon for the whole group. You have to diffuse these situations
as they arise. What you hope for as a teacher is a certain organic wholeness,
a sense of enterprise within the class as a collectivity. You work on
this by bringing everyone into the business of each class. Remember, no
freeloaders. You do it by controlling the monopolists and by drawing out
the silent ones. You do it by making sure that the self-worth in a student's
comment builds within the immediate intellectual challenge that the group
is facing. My own gauge for success in thinking about the corporate identity
of the class takes the form of an aspiration. I hope that if I were suddenly
called from the room my class would continue the discussion at hand without
a break.
A third and related element of awareness might be called the musketeer
syndrome: all for one and one for all. You face a dozen quick decisions
in every class as to whether you favor an individual student or the group.
Most of the time, the individual and the group work in tandem. Most of
the time, you will give the group priority if there is an implied conflict.
Even so, you owe every individual student time in your class, and there
will be moments when you will want to sacrifice the group for that individual.
Let me offer a quick example from recent experience. This year I was teaching
The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The novel is about a young, beautiful,
and socially prominent woman who turns her back on place and preference
and who, as an increasing outsider, eventually commits suicide. The book,
naturally, is more complicated, but this quick summary is all you need
to know to appreciate the dilemma of my student, a Korean American, who
was striving very, very hard to fit within her adopted culture. She was
supremely threatened by The Awakening. She saw that Chopin's character
was throwing away everything that she was working for, and she needed
to talk about it. Why, she wanted to know, should this perfectly adapted
character fail to participate in society and then take her own life? It
made no sense to her. My student, you will gather, was operating on an
entirely different level than her peers in the class. Nevertheless, I
gave her five minutes of our class to explain her point of view. She needed
every one of them. For that time in that situation, the others had to
wait.
There is another and perhaps more controversial aspect of one's awareness
of students. Simply put, I teach most of the time to my best students.
There is, in fact, little choice in the matter if you want to hold your
class. One of the talents that you need to develop in the classroom is
the ability to watch and gauge your students even as you are thinking
or talking with them. Your better students are your weather vanes. If
they do not understand what you are saying, then no one does. If they
are manifestly bored, it is time to move on. You compensate by being available
to all of your students outside of class. Office hours, you know, don't
sound like much. You can find a way to spend an hour and a half in your
office before going home. The easiest thing in the world is to turn a
student away from your door. But because you are moving quickly in a class—particularly
here at the University of Chicago—you must be ready to spend a lot
of time outside of that class with your slower students. You have to give
your people the time that they need, and you are not going to do it in
an hour and a half a week.
There is one last level of awareness of your students that is worth stressing
to new teachers. You want to think carefully, even clinically about your
students' actual situations as they present them to you. Who seems to
be in trouble? Who is pressing? Who is nervous? Who is riding for a fall?
Whether you consider a display of intellectual arrogance to be merely
that or a mask for painful insecurities will determine a great deal about
how you respond to it. You are, in short, a counselor as well as a teacher,
and you can help your students more than you might think by understanding
the direction behind their performances.
A concrete example might help here. In that first expository writing
class that I alluded to earlier, I managed to bring an alienated female
student from the periphery into the center of intellectual activity of
the class. Her work improved mightily during the semester, and I was proud
of our mutual success right up until the moment when she broke into tears
in public over the discovery that her instructor was a married man. I
failed that student in the sense that I was the cause of unnecessary embarrassment
and pain to her. I failed to see what was happening. I was so absorbed
in my success that I did not think about the additional dimension and
guard against it. Remember, the goal is not just to get your students'
attention or to win their applause or even to teach them. The goal is
to contribute to their ideal growth and development. You should realize
that you are dealing with a population that is going through a very difficult
maturation period. Make sure that you contribute to that growth instead
of hindering it.
5. An idea is not an idea until you hear it from your students.—My
fifth commandment is a little different, and I hope that we are getting
into less familiar territory as we move along. It is this: an idea is
not an idea until you hear it from your students. I believe this one more
with each passing day. You can be brilliant on the subject of realism
in American fiction or on Weber's theory of charisma in a sociology class,
but, if your students do not come up with an understanding of realism
or charisma, you have been plowing in the sea. Several years ago, I listened
to a colleague deliver an excellent lecture on eighteenth-century prose
to a class of juniors and seniors. This professor was a former actor,
a man with a fine voice and sense of audience, and he had never been more
brilliant than on that day. But the young woman on my left, an industrious
note taker for the first few moments, seemed at first confused and then
disinterested. Her mind wandered, and then, forty minutes into the class,
she wrote at the top of her page, "Who is Dr. Johnson, anyway?" I hope
the lesson is clear. Who is Dr. Johnson, anyway? The goal of the class,
no matter what the class, is to get your students to use the ideas that
you have suggested to them. They must understand first. Then perhaps they
might go beyond even your own understanding of those ideas. When the latter
happens, when you see something for the first time because a student tells
you about it, you have received perhaps the greatest reward that the classroom
has to offer.
There are many ways to test your students, but the best way, certainly
the most immediate, is to listen to them. Listening is an art. As a teacher,
you have to be listening and thinking at the same time. This procedure
will require all of your concentration. I can summarize its importance
through a subordinate premise: it is extremely hard to figure out what
your class knows. Indeed, I'll add a subsidiary to the subordinate premise:
it gets harder to figure out what your class knows as you get older. One
of the incipient signs of old fogyness in the teaching profession is that
frequent complaint that students know less than they once did. In all
likelihood, it is not a matter of knowing less but of knowing something
different from what you expect them to know. Get beyond your feelings
of depression about your students' presumed ignorance as fast as you can.
Find out what they do know and learn to work with it. This is the foundation
on which you build.
As a young, beginning teacher, your sense of what your students know
is the one area where you have a tremendous advantage. You have a shared
experiential context with students who are only somewhat younger than
yourselves in music, history, film, style, and general culture. Use that
experience. As an older teacher, you must learn to compensate. The seminal
event of my student days was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For
the student of today, that event might as well be the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln. The longer you teach, the harder you have to work at
reaching your students across the history that increasingly separates
where it once united.
Let me explain what I mean from an incident in class just this week.
I have a student, a good one, who is writing on T. S. Eliot's The Waste
Land. We were discussing the second section, "A Game of Chess," in
which two young women in a pub discuss a third as part of a whole series
of images of debased sexuality:
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
My student, a child of the eighties, automatically assumed that the pills
in question were birth-control pills. The Waste Land, of course,
was written in 1922, and there were no birth-control pills in 1922. The
section is about pills that force a miscarriage or an abortion. My point
is that I will never teach the passage in quite the same way again because
of my conversation with this student. I have learned from his ignorance.
Don't underestimate that resource. The truth in teaching is always a complex
thing. I remind you of Henry Thoreau's comment on the importance of dialogue.
"It takes two to speak the truth," writes Thoreau, "one to speak and another
to hear."
6. Never answer your own questions.—Rule number
six follows from number five. Never answer your own questions. It took
me quite awhile to learn this one, but I now try to abide by it faithfully.
If you answer your own questions, your students will quickly appreciate
the pattern, and they will wait for your answers instead of thinking about
the problem at hand. The great difficulty with the sixth commandment is
that you must be prepared to wait for answers. You must not be afraid
of silence, or, as a colleague has expressed the idea, learn to make silence
work for you instead of against you.
Accepting silence, enduring silence upon occasion, has been my hardest
lesson as a teacher. The natural impulse is to leap right in or to move
on. But I would remind you that a good question—one worth asking—is
not easily answered. Moreover, you are not usually interested in the first
thing that comes tripping off of the tongue. Take some comfort, when these
silences arise, from Eliot's lines in "Ash Wednesday":
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
But if you are not poetically inspired or are still faint of heart, let
me suggest a few strategies. I will sometimes reformulate the question
in a more leading way. Sometimes, if I think the question is crucial,
I will turn around and write it on the the board and just leave it there
for the class to think about. Sometimes, I will simply say, "This is a
difficult question. Take your time in thinking about it." Very occasionally,
I will even say, "This is perhaps too difficult a question for us to consider
at this moment," and we will move on without further comment. Invariably,
you find that your students return to the question on their own at the
proper time.
There are important compensations for this technique. Some of the most
rewarding moments that I have experienced as a teacher have come when
a group of students have come to me about a raised query. "All right,"
they will say," we have thought about it, and this is what we think. Now,
what do you think about it?" The goal, as always, is intelligent thought.
Emerson puts the matter best for me: "One must be an inventor to read
well. There is creative reading as well as creative writing. When the
mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read
becomes luminous with manifold allusion."
7. Take a few calculated risks in your class and, now and then,
even some uncalculated ones.—Number seven must be understood
with special care: take a few calculated risks in your class and, now
and then, even some uncalculated ones. Education is a speculative venture.
You must allow for spontaneity for your own sake and everyone else's.
As a beginning teacher, you are likely to feel the greatest sense of conflict
between your agenda and classroom discussion. You will have that agenda
in front of you, and you will be tempted to follow it too mechanically.
Obviously, there are things that you must accomplish in a given class—that
is your agenda—but don't be too slavish about it. Experienced teachers
probably try to accomplish less in an agenda, but they work much harder
to have that agenda emerge in a seemingly spontaneous and integral fashion.
Don't be in such a hurry to tell the truth. Benjamin Franklin was right
when he says that people learn best when they think that they have thought
of it themselves. Taking risks is also an important mechanism for sustaining
your own interest in the teaching process. That class is best where you
also learn something. You want to be receptive to the good, unexpected
response, the point that takes a lesson in a different though still valuable
direction. Oh yes, there is one last thing about taking risks. Sometimes
you are going to fail. That is in the nature of taking risks. But you
will be astonished by the generosity of your students on this score. More
times than not, they will emphasize their own excitement in the chance
that has been taken.
8. Welcome change.—My eighth suggestion is
a real commandment. I am prepared to have it written in stone for Charlton
Heston to carry off of the mountain. I can give it in just two words:
welcome change. Try different things as a teacher over time. Embrace new
possibilities. You don't really need to hear this commandment right away
as a new teacher, but I want to warn you that universities and colleges
and high schools are filled with once vital teachers who have turned into
hollow men and women by delivering the same canned classes year after
year. The canned lecture is to learning what rust is to metal. It disturbs
and undermines the integrity of the vital substance. No one expects an
entirely new preparation every year for every class session, but the line
of demarcation here is sharper than most realize. There is a world of
difference between knowing your class notes and knowing your subject.
If you know your class notes, you are prepared to say what you said before.
If you know the substance, you are ready to engage in a fresh understanding.
Your students always deserve the latter. The first is always possible,
but it is also a cheat. My personal rule of thumb for insuring change
is to teach at least one new course every year. Collaborations with other
teachers in group courses is another insurance policy. At the very least,
make sure that you have changed your texts in existing courses. It will
be easier not to change the texts, but no one ever said that good teaching
was going to be an easy matter.
9. Make sure that they enjoy it.—My ninth
commandment did not come from direct experience, but it struck me so forcefully
when I first heard of it that I do not conduct a single class without
thinking of it. A friend of mine, as a young beginning teacher, had the
experience of getting to know I. A. Richards, the father of practical
criticism and a major figure in literary circles generally throughout
the first half of the century. Richards was then in his late seventies,
and my friend was busily engaged in working up a lecture on Oliver Goldsmith.
Richards asked my friend what he was going to do and received a rather
lengthy analysis of the ins and outs of the situation, the organization
of the lecture, the goals of the class, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When my friend was finally finished, Richards responded that he had forgotten
one thing. "You have forgotten the most important thing," Richards said,
"make sure that they enjoy it."
So the ninth commandment is just that: make sure that they enjoy it.
The greatest compliment that students can pay you is to tell you that
they are sorry when the course is over. When a C student tells you that,
you can have some hope that you may have been doing your job. Your students
should look forward to your class. They should want to be there. Learning
is an innately enjoyable process. If it is not in your classroom, then
something is wrong. Indeed, the institutionalization of learning threatens
the primal truth that learning is enjoyable. Institutions—habit,
schedule, convention—turn the classroom into a requirement instead
of a privilege.
I am a teacher of literature, and this status gives me an inestimable
advantage in trying to create interest, excitement, and pleasure in the
classroom. As Samuel Johnson has put the matter, "A book should teach
us to enjoy life or to endure it." The problem, alas, is that too many
teachers assume that great literature will necessarily do that all by
itself. It might, in fact, but you cannot afford to trust to that hope.
You will hear professors tell each other and their students that "on the
college level we assume interest." Nothing could be more benighted. Never
assume interest! Part of your task, always, is to engender interest and
to keep it alive. Professors have a bad habit of assuming the importance
of their subject. You may assume it, but don't forget to demonstrate it
along the way. I try to keep in mind Montaigne's aspiration that "the
gain from our study is to become better and wiser by it." The aspiration
will mean different things on different levels—a different thing
for a high school student than for a professor of graduate students. Still,
as you prepare a class, it is not a bad idea to think about what "better
and wiser" might mean in the particular context of your classroom. This
may sound like a heavy burden, maybe even a pretentious one, but I find
it to be an indispensable concern. Students will have their own reasons
for taking your class, but, if and when you are asked for a reason—in
a moment of uncertainty or perhaps of challenge—you want to have
not just an answer but the best answer of which you are capable.
9 1/2. It is what your students take outside of the classroom,
not what they do within it, that counts.—We've come
to the final half commandment that I promised, and I hope that you will
view my fraction as more than a conjurer's trick to hold your interest.
As I said at the beginning, the half indicates, in part, an open-endedness,
a lack of closure, a need for you to set up your own rules in keeping
with your own personality and experience. But I also call it the ninth-and-half
commandment because it extends wildly outside of the frame of reference
that we have been discussing: namely, your performance in the classroom.
Not to make a mystery of it, the last commandment states that "it is what
your students take outside of the classroom, not what they do within it,
that counts."
I mean for this knowledge to be rather humbling. Your brilliance in the
classroom counts for nothing if your students don't remember something
after the experience. You want to think very hard about what they are
to remember. What they do remember can be quite bizarre. A quick
example should suffice here. Last year, in teaching The Iliad,
I happened to mention that marvelous moment of closure near the end of
Homer's epic where Achilleus' divine mother, Thetis, comforts his grief
and tries to return him to everyday life. "Go back to your women," says
Thetis, "and sleep with them as you did before." On the examination, about
two-thirds of my freshmen observed that "Achilleus' mother said it is
all right for him to sleep with anyone he wishes to . . . and this makes
his life happy again." This response was my failure. There will always
be some throwaway comment in one of your classes that your students will
cling to and that will come back to haunt you. What they remember can
be frighteningly insufficient by your standards.
What I would emphasize, however, is that to instruct and to educate are
not synonyms. "To instruct" means to put in, it means to inform, it means
to furnish with knowledge and information. "To educate," from the Latin
educare, ex-ducare, means to bring out of, or to lead forth. Instruction,
in other words, leads on to education, but they are not the same. You
instruct your students, but you hope that they educate themselves through
that instruction. I think that it is Pascal who says that the definition
of an educated person involves one who can happily spend time alone in
a room—someone, that is, who has the resources to entertain the self
through thought and reflection.
It is my own personal belief that students learn more from each other
than from their teachers. If you are lucky, they will listen to what you
have to say, and they will, in some instances, even seek you out for confirmation
or even an extension of the thought in question. But they will truly test
what they know by arguing about it amongst their peers. Whether it is
a math problem set, an essay assignment, or the interpretation of a book,
the refining process of what they know takes place in those debates within
their own generation. You can see that process at work in just about every
conference room of Regenstein library on a given night.
One way of thinking about your task as a teacher is to ask yourself exactly
what they should remember from a class. What can you say to keep them
thinking about the subject? Or better yet, what can you say or what can
you do that will keep an idea or work alive for when they will actually
need it? When the Pequod finally sinks beneath the waves at the end of
Moby-Dick on some Thursday afternoon late in the winter quarter,
it has indeed sunk in vain unless your student, sometime later, argues
with someone about the nature of "the predestinating head" that put it
there.
Of one thing you can be certain. If your students leave your class with
nothing else, they will leave it with some image of you, their teacher.
The word "professor" is often a term of respect and sometimes one of derision,
but the image that you want to leave your students with is the original
meaning that we have lost sight of. Originally, to profess meant to make
a public statement of what one believed, it meant to declare one's faith
openly, to make a religious statement of one's convictions in a way that
conveyed one's knowledge and integrity. I would submit that this is still
true if properly understood. You want to convey your passion for what
you are doing but not with the object of appearing as some idealized individual
or saint.
If you have demonstrated the integrity of your subject matter with all
of your involvement behind it, you can hope that your student will identify
with the thinking process and not with the thinker. You will have taught
three things because each is useless without the other two. You will have
conveyed, first, the true complexity of your subject, second, the high
worthiness and pleasure of thinking about that subject, and third, the
ability, despite every complexity, for actually thinking about it. You
will have led your student into that proverbial empty room with enough
capacity for thought to remain there—at least occasionally. You can
even hope that, if another enters this room, that something interesting
might be said there.
Robert A. Ferguson is the former
Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Department of English Language
and Literature and the College, the University of Chicago. He is currently
George E. Woodbury Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University.
Although Ferguson's advice is primarily addressed to those who plan to
use the discussion method, his commandments do, as he notes, deal with
issues that will be of concern to all beginning teachers. Moreover, his
recommendation about effort is one that underlies a sizable proportion
of the questions beginning teachers ask as they prepare to enter the classroom,
irrespective of the teaching method they plan to employ. Accordingly,
the next section amplifies the topic of preparing for class by responding
in general terms to two questions commonly asked by beginning teachers.
The sections dealing with lecture and discussion teaching offer additional
suggestions for preparation.
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