Why I am still in love with English
My English professor from last semester won the Distinguished Teaching Award for the year. When asked about his statement of intent in teaching, he said this:
Teaching is a way of "thinking aloud together." Early in every semester something happens that affirms Immanuel Kant's notion that thinking is a communal activity: a student asks a question I cannot answer or raises an issue that never occurred to me; students begin to debate among themselves, without routing their ideas through me; someone reports back with new information to illuminate a previous discussion. Even in a large Berkeley lecture, where I'm doing most of the "thinking aloud,” the give-and-take pulse of conversation remains an intellectual ideal, even if it needs some artificial grafting. I hoard chairs in my office so students from those large classes can enter in clusters and talk to each other. When bits of those conversations find their way back into a lecture, the whole class better understands that teaching is not a one-way dissemination of knowledge but a way of thinking "in community with others."
Even in my smallest classes, where discussion should be as genuinely open as possible, I try to leave room for sustained, dynamic argument. If by "thinking aloud" I can make the pleasure of careful, patient discovery accessible to my students, then they return that pleasure in the form of their own more rigorous and imaginative arguments, their own more probing questions, and their willingness to challenge limits I myself did not recognize. That pleasure is the origin and outcome of "thinking in community with others."
More than fifty years ago, Cleanth Brooks spoke for a generation of critics who passionately believed that teaching students to read literature closely contributes to the general social good: reading poetry makes them "better citizens." I do not know whether the intellectual excitement of literary encounter makes anyone "better." We have no idea what, if anything, our students will do with that excitement beyond the classroom.
Some of the skills English majors learn have practical uses, and the others won't harm them, but few of our students will benefit directly from what happens in our classes and almost never in terms of employment. Although this use-value deficit puts us in the position of always having to justify our relevance, and sometimes leads us to exaggerate it, the absence of clear outcomes can also be liberating. At their best our classrooms are the unacknowledged research and development laboratories of the world, experiments in "thinking aloud" where new ideas have a chance because they are not responsible to overly specific goals. Here, relatively freely, we can discuss the most sensitive and controversial issues, precisely because we are not making policy or shaping the future specialists of any given profession. Any respectful, well-argued idea is worth trying, for there is very little at stake should it fail. At the risk of sounding "romantic," I might say the literature classroom is one of the few places where unaccountable knowledge can still happen.
***
The last paragraph in particular is what I love about this. English doesn't have to have a point. Perhaps that's what's go great about it.
I have an English final today and tomorrow, a history final tomorrow as well, and while I don't feel particularly prepared for history or Shakespeare, the one final that I have today should go well. And then I have the rest of the day to study for the others.
And then on Thursday I go home. Back behind the Orange Curtain for a summer...
Teaching is a way of "thinking aloud together." Early in every semester something happens that affirms Immanuel Kant's notion that thinking is a communal activity: a student asks a question I cannot answer or raises an issue that never occurred to me; students begin to debate among themselves, without routing their ideas through me; someone reports back with new information to illuminate a previous discussion. Even in a large Berkeley lecture, where I'm doing most of the "thinking aloud,” the give-and-take pulse of conversation remains an intellectual ideal, even if it needs some artificial grafting. I hoard chairs in my office so students from those large classes can enter in clusters and talk to each other. When bits of those conversations find their way back into a lecture, the whole class better understands that teaching is not a one-way dissemination of knowledge but a way of thinking "in community with others."
Even in my smallest classes, where discussion should be as genuinely open as possible, I try to leave room for sustained, dynamic argument. If by "thinking aloud" I can make the pleasure of careful, patient discovery accessible to my students, then they return that pleasure in the form of their own more rigorous and imaginative arguments, their own more probing questions, and their willingness to challenge limits I myself did not recognize. That pleasure is the origin and outcome of "thinking in community with others."
More than fifty years ago, Cleanth Brooks spoke for a generation of critics who passionately believed that teaching students to read literature closely contributes to the general social good: reading poetry makes them "better citizens." I do not know whether the intellectual excitement of literary encounter makes anyone "better." We have no idea what, if anything, our students will do with that excitement beyond the classroom.
Some of the skills English majors learn have practical uses, and the others won't harm them, but few of our students will benefit directly from what happens in our classes and almost never in terms of employment. Although this use-value deficit puts us in the position of always having to justify our relevance, and sometimes leads us to exaggerate it, the absence of clear outcomes can also be liberating. At their best our classrooms are the unacknowledged research and development laboratories of the world, experiments in "thinking aloud" where new ideas have a chance because they are not responsible to overly specific goals. Here, relatively freely, we can discuss the most sensitive and controversial issues, precisely because we are not making policy or shaping the future specialists of any given profession. Any respectful, well-argued idea is worth trying, for there is very little at stake should it fail. At the risk of sounding "romantic," I might say the literature classroom is one of the few places where unaccountable knowledge can still happen.
***
The last paragraph in particular is what I love about this. English doesn't have to have a point. Perhaps that's what's go great about it.
I have an English final today and tomorrow, a history final tomorrow as well, and while I don't feel particularly prepared for history or Shakespeare, the one final that I have today should go well. And then I have the rest of the day to study for the others.
And then on Thursday I go home. Back behind the Orange Curtain for a summer...