JC's End-Of-The-Semester Reflections: A Mini-Series (2nd episode)

A conversation I had with a friend quite a while ago, just as I was completing my undergraduate degree, has been looming around all semester. He told me that teachers have to be careful not to let whatever shtick they practice in the classroom get in the way of what they’re teaching. He’s an art professor that used to wear a kind of hard-ass but clearly caring persona. I’m not sure what identity he walks into the classroom with currently. I remember the flippant comment bothering me. I thought about what performances my own college teachers were conscious of when they stood in front of the classroom. Teaching, not unlike being a student, is about performing. The professor who helped me connect 'literature' to the real world was famous for long, strange tangents that made it difficult to get into one of his packed classes. I fell in love with the history of Western philosophy not because of Descartes’ dashing good looks or Heidegger’s singing voice, but because of a teacher who knew how to tell stories about these thinkers and seemed to be awe struck by what he was teaching (even though he’d taught the class every semester for several years). My forth grade teacher wore suits everyday except Friday. He was a veteran, commanded respect, and was seemingly stronger than my mythical grandfather. But he could launch into a fantastical story about surfing atop great white sharks or start dancing to a student’s mindless humming at any moment. His was a memorable shtick.

But did it get in the way of learning? I don’t know. I suppose I can’t remember what I learned in the forth grade, or if I’m positive those particular college teachers actually taught me anything. They inspired me, sure, but I think there’s a difference between inspiring and teaching. Most of us, of course, have all watched movies like
"Dead Poets Society," "Dangerous Minds," and "Freedom Writers." So we’re conditioned to think of the good teacher as someone able to connect to and inspire their students. They swoop in and open the eyes of the blind, fight the oppressing administrative bureaucracy, and lift their students out of complacency into self-reflective authenticity. I’ll admit I love these teacher-saves-all movies as much as the next sap, but the problem, I think, lies in the incessant celebration of the teaching persona over and above the students. That is, these movie-teachers simply do things to students. And in my short and relatively naïve experience, that’s generally not how meaningful learning takes place. A class that blew my mind and not only changed the direction of what I wanted to do inside academe, but the way I thought about the world was run by a woman with, well, no real teaching persona at all. Most the time, I didn’t even know what we were doing or what I was supposed to be learning. She was boring. It was called "Essay Writing," and she had us reading about 'performative speech acts' and social construction. It was weird and she just wasn’t good at telling me why any of it mattered. Slowly, however, I started to discover what felt like entirely new ideas. It was a class that had me pacing around my house at two or three in the morning, contemplating crazy implications in the reading and obsessing over every word in everything I wrote. I didn’t spend much time thinking about her, but I connected everything she taught in that class to my life.

Now I’m very much the kind of teacher that relies on a good persona. And while I like to imagine most of my students encounter some new ideas in our class, I worry that what they generally encounter is this persona I’ve reflexively created for the classroom. For example, I’ve just finished reading "analytical reflection" papers. Students reread all their work from the semester (I asked them to look at all their courses). Then they wrote about interesting developments, differences, improvements, insights, anything that stood out to them. They were fun. Most of my students built the essay around a particular passage of their own writing. They wanted their audience (which varied from next year’s incoming freshman to their future selves) to recognize what one word can do to a particular passage, and better, how to change the structure or rhetorical appeal in the work to generate different meaning. Many of them were unbelievable. (The first set I looked even made my eyes water a little. But in my defense, I read them after dinner and a few glasses of wine). Of course, what I started to realize is that quite of few of these students had learned how to appeal to the passions of my teaching persona. They were without question producing prose for a particular audience beyond me, and that’s great. But not so far underneath the surface of nearly every paper is a quiet expression of the same teaching persona I can’t help but wear when I get with my students. So, I have to spend this winter wondering if my friend was right—if a shtick can get in the way of discovery (learning).