Lefton Learning Community

The Personae of College Teachers

Kevin Lewis, Department of Religious Studies

I didn't know how to teach. My graduate school did not believe in training me for the classroom.

After twenty years of it, mostly at USC, I am more confident than when I started. Anyone would be. Yes, with experience comes mastery of a personal accumulation of techniques, comes a repertoire of gimmicks and dodges that fits one as a quirky individual for useful work with students. This book is full of helpful suggestions for such teaching praxis (or pratique).

What previous editions of the book have managed to avoid, however, is the teaching mystique.

"Wear a different necktie everyday."

That was the sole considered advice on teaching Norman Maclean would pass on to his graduate literary criticism class at the University of Chicago. Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It in his retirement, was a legendary teacher in the English Department. The man had crust. Seated always at a desk, occasionally racked by a smoker's cough, he would hold us enthralled, amused, and cowed for his appointed hour. We loved the guy. His major professor had passed to him the advice about the tie, and he, upon reflection, passed it on to us: men, women, no matter how informally we dressed in the late sixties.

And that's the sole advice that comes to mind now to share with younger scholars headed for the theater of the college classroom, headed for that bully stage on which we all collegially work together though we work apart. Some things stick. But the connection to the mysteries of teaching?

Clothes and the way we rotate and vary them counts, of course. Because of Maclean I never throw away any neckties; but, still more, teaching effectively has to do with the way we move. It has to do with manner, with serendipitous blocking and body language. Assuming we believe in what we are doing, have attained intellectual competence, and are genuinely immersed in our material, the most important element of teaching as such is the improvisational interactive choreography of the teacher in front of (alongside of, in and out of) a particular arrangement of students in a particular room. The mystique of teaching is intimately connected to the physique of teaching.

To give life to instruction, we perforce contrive a personalized dance of argument and seduction made of varying proportions of calculation and instinct. For we are dead, the act is a bust, until we find our own way of playing to an audience, of using space, and of dramatizing our material as though we alone could bring it to life and in that fleeting, precious hour. How else to refute at least one portion of Leslie Fiedler's decree that these three things, dead a long time, now require interment: traditional services of religious worship, the nineteenth century novel, and the classroom lecture?

Do not sit when you can stand. Do not simply stand there. At the risk of appearing ridiculous to yourself because at first this may be unnatural, use every possible excuse to move about. Use the blackboard, lean against walls, pick something up off the floor, kick a wastebasket, go nearer to where the student talking sits, scratch yourself, open a window, try caricature stage gestures, jab the air, hitch up your pants or skirt. Anything, but keep varying it, keep moving, and keep altering the timbre of your voice. If reducing your voice to a whisper works to hold or deepen attention, do that. I've heard that it can, but it doesn't for me at the moment.

Seriously, shamelessly, cultivate a ham self-consciousness of bestriding a stage as the last giant in the earth, owning all the reaches of that theater, holding the audience helplessly captive by the stops you pull out as you dramatically embody the material under discussion.

The shtick I propose for the scholar-teacher is that of a play-acting maestro-channeler. Easy for a twenty-year veteran to suggest, you may say.

Maybe so, but whatever it is I do in a classroom to follow my own advice still does not come naturally. Mine remains consciously an evolving, experimental classroom persona (and a suspect version of myself, at that), constructed in response to the theater of the large, not the small classthat's another, if related matter. This other personality I have gradually built up makes me nervous at the same time I can see that it serves my teaching well. I still must move into and out of this persona, when I do, by a conscious act of will.

But, in moderate doses, self-consciousness of teaching as theater is a positive, not a negative. Nor do I wish it away, that stage fright; I want that edge. When I eventually lose it, my playing to an audience will have evolved into an inert cluster of tics and crotchets.

Remember that we like enthusiasm in our teachers. We like to think of this kind of teacher as so full of it, it just has to come pouring out, like a force of nature, for us as students to catch in big buckets as it comes. Strive for this. I recall two models from college.

One, a robust Polish linguist, had skied out of Poland through the mountains during World War II to escape the Germans and to enlist in a Polish division of the RAF. His consuming Romantic passion for learning and teaching remains the standard to which I aspire whenever I enter a classroom for yet another opportunity to make something happen. Sometimes, in that Freshman classroom, he could hardly catch his breath for excitement.

The other, an older philosophy professor, held forth in an old building in a room with a creaky stage a foot off the floor. His characteristic stance in lecture was teetering at the edge of that stage, legs locked at the knees, bent at the waist, shoulders thrust out from his space into ours, fingers clasped below his stomach, literally bugeyed with conviction. Of course he would occasionally fall off.

His example, and others like it, make the world of the classroom safe for feigned and unfeigned theatrical body languages, behaviors, even outright pratfalls in the service of one's subject. Of course teaching is an art; herein resides its mystery. It is an experimental, improvisational art of which the three great enemies are excessive selfconsciousness, solemn prudence, and kneejerk propriety. With all three of these I do battle, and with a fourth: fear of falling off the stage.

One of the nicest things a student ever said to me about my classroom performance that I recall; twenty years ago I started out a stiff nerd with a stutter, planted firmly behind a security podium was "You remind me of Letterman." Dream on. But we both should! (Better, this past spring on a student evaluation I was graduated to Indiana Jones.)

If observers remark that in actuality I am more restrained as a teacher than I am here making myself out to bewhich is true they should realize how far I have come, in both classroom operations, and neckties.

But all of my examples are male. After the fourth grade, I never again saw a female teacher, all the way through graduate seminars. What I write reflects but one individual's experience incubated over those earlier years in what amounted, now that I look back, to a vacuum chamber. At this point, a female colleague, likeminded, should weigh in with testimony to the potentialities of a woman's self-reinvention as a classroom teacher. Give us a woman's take on the mystique of teaching!

Everything I hear from students at USC confirms that the majority hope to find teachers who, by example, will make them want to learn something, anything! The mystery of effective teaching as an art is realized at that point where teaching and entertainment meet in combustion. Count on this: everyone wants two things, in equal measureto learn something and to have fun. This dictum is no less true of what should happen in the theater hive of the classroom. If we are serious about teaching, we will get the body into it, along with the trained and strategizing intellect: placing our whole person on the edge at risk. We will throw in the kitchen sink to create that infectious moment in which teaching/learning and spontaneous play converge.

Teaching is an ephemeral art. But while life is short (vita brevis), art is long (ars longa). Students remember this kind of teaching. They remember what they learned from it.