Dear Ainsley,
Back when we were in graduate school I often marveled that so many of our peers and professors said they “loved teaching.” I knew then—and know now—that teaching is easily the most valuable thing academics do, far more important than their scholarship, but nevertheless I was never comfortable in the classroom. Teaching was a constant source of anxiety, frustration, and disappointment for me. Why did everybody else love what I found aggravating? What was wrong with them? (For there was clearly nothing wrong with me.)
Confused, I considered the matter carefully, until at length I arrived at an anatomy of professors who say they love teaching.
There are four general types:
1) Liars
2) Authoritarians
3) Narcissists
4) Those suffering from Stockholm Syndrome
Allow me to expand on each.
1. Liars
Whenever I heard my colleagues discuss teaching, I was reminded of books about life in the old Soviet bloc. If three or more of us were gathered, especially if we didn’t know each other all that well, we all loved teaching—and we were so good at it too! Every class, like the five-year plan, was a staggering success.
It was only after we got to know each other, and in private moments, that the truth would sometimes come out. The seminar was a disaster. The syllabus incoherent. The students sullen and disengaged. Sometimes just the thought of getting up there in front of them was enough to turn your stomach.
The only article I have been able to find on this subject was, unsurprisingly, pseudonymous. The author explained his decision to remain unknown thusly: “the pressure to publicly pledge your love for teaching means that some administrators and colleagues at my institution, having read this, would recall only that I dislike teaching, not that I nonetheless make an effort to be good at it.”
Why the pressure to love teaching? As the author observes, loving teaching and being good at it are two different things. Professors are trained as scholars, and precious few get comparable training in pedagogy, but when someone says they love something, we usually assume they are good at it. Or at least it would be rude to say otherwise. Sometimes I fear that saying we “love teaching” is a way of concealing our inadequacies behind an amateur’s winning enthusiasm. It keeps students (and their parents) from asking too many questions.
2. Authoritarians
Let me further divide this type into classroom and intellectual authoritarians.
Some professors begin the semester by announcing that by the end of the term, they would like all the students to agree with them. This is not the kind of intellectual authoritarianism I mean. In fact, this announcement is usually a clever ploy to awaken the students’ critical faculties (“oh yeah, old man? We’ll see about that!”), and so is not actually authoritarian at all.
No. The real intellectual authoritarians are subtler. They declare that their classrooms are wide-open debate forums, and then by smiles and nods and encouragement, teach the students exactly what is and is not the right thing to say. They love teaching because they are so proud of how much their students change over the course of a single semester, often in terms of their political views, which is to say how well they learn to parrot the noises coming from the front of the classroom.
I’m not sure these professors are always aware of what they’re up to. Many of them probably do consider themselves open-minded and welcoming, only then they help the benighted to see the light. Either way, this is an education in manners, not ideas.
(To be fair, it will be useful once the students enter the white-collar workforce and need to flatter their bosses.)
Next are the classroom authoritarians. Blessed by a rage for order, they carefully plot out every classroom activity and assignment, and if they find a formula that works, they may stick with it for next 20 or 30 years.
Consider Carolyn Walker Bynum, one of my favorite medievalists. In her essay “Teaching Scholarship,” she points out that most high schools and even colleges no longer teach undergraduates to perform research, beyond an internet search. If she wants her graduate students to know how, she has to instruct them.
First, she teaches them to read. “In the second or third week of class I have students bring with them a one-sentence summary of the book we are discussing. Then I have a student volunteer to put his or her statement on the board. We usually spend the entire class period revising that sentence together until we finally have a statement that accurately sums up what the author is saying.” The next week students bring in a scholarly book review and talk about what it accomplishes and, when they realize how it situates the book in a whole field of existing literature, they “immediately realize that they usually don’t know enough to write a good review.” After that they pick a long footnote from a scholarly book and check its accuracy, relevance, and fairness, line by line. “Such an exercise leads to a new respect for how much work goes into the deployment of even a single bit of supporting evidence.”
I haven’t even touched how slowly and painstakingly she demands that the students build up their own research papers.
Has a note of admiration crept into my voice? That would not surprise me. In my view, many of our most effective pedagogues have a dash of Il Duce in them. Education, after all, descends from Latin words like educare (to train or mold) and educere (to lead forth).
In another one of her essays Bynum reminisces about the day she knew she would be a teacher. She arranged her siblings and friends into orderly rows and directed their attention to herself and the blackboard behind her, even though she didn’t have anything to write on it. Can you imagine the presence of mind and the force of personality on display here, Ainsley? She was six years old.
Classroom authoritarians love teaching because every class is a new chance to exercise control: to train, to mold, to lead. For this reason, they are not always popular, but I for one would have benefitted from a class like Bynum’s. I think every young scholar would. If I could, I would still enroll in it today. Meum educate!
3. Narcissists
These are the students’ favorites. They are so fun! They are so funny! They are forever cracking jokes and delivering the best edutainment that tuition money can buy. Whether or not the students are learning anything in their classes is beside the point, as they are not there to be enlightened but to provide an audience.
They love teaching because it makes them the focal point of attention, and so among them you will find every kind of exhibitionist, showboat, peacock, gasconade, cockalorum, fanfaronade, figjam, rodomontade, and blatherskite. They will turn even seminars into lectures, blustering from one point to the next without rhyme or reason, and certainly without forethought or lesson planning of any kind, while at conferences they ignore the paper time limits and dominate the Q&A despite never being asked a question. Their behavior in faculty meetings is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is not good.
These professors are often active on social media. Very active.
And the complaining! If they are not trying to get a laugh out of their students they are denouncing the university administration, the Republican state legislature, those fascists on Fox News, or anyone else who refuses to notice them. (Including, so often, their scholarly peers.)
Perhaps I am exaggerating. Not all faculty narcissists are as amusing as I’ve made them out to be. The saddest case I ever knew was an English professor who turned our two and half hour graduate seminars into monologues. My throat got dry just listening to him. Older students knew better than to take his classes, and the younger cohorts learned quickly. The next year my advisor forwarded an e-mail from this professor to the graduate student listserv; he wanted to see if anyone would take his class, which would be cancelled if nobody enrolled. Nobody did.
I felt terrible for him, because he really did love teaching, or at least speaking in front of a classroom. Not bad enough, though, that I didn’t warn off a curious friend.
I should pause to admit that there are those who love teaching for altruistic rather than selfish reasons, good souls who love nothing more than to see the light of knowledge catch, kindle, and blaze in a student’s heart.
You will recognize them because they are forever looking for opportunities to teach. They volunteer to guest lecture or lead their colleagues’ seminars, and if they teach lecture classes, they reserve a section for themselves. They do its grading, too.
They spent last summer desperately trying to figure out how to move their classes online, despite the lack of guidance from their departments and deans. Once they retire they set up shop again in churches or retirement homes. No enrollment is too small, no classroom too humble. They are the salt of the earth, and I haven’t known more than a few.
4. Those suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
This is the one I know best. Try as I might, Ainsley, I could not get used to the weird power dynamics of the classroom.
I, teacher man, had the authority to determine the subject matter, to plan each class and move it along as I saw fit, and most importantly, I held the power to grade the little monsters. It’s hard to imagine a stronger whip hand than that.
The trouble is that each class would be an absolute failure without the students’ buy-in and participation, and none of them would suffer quite like me if they just sat there in silence.
In sum, I was in the unenviable position of being both in charge and needing to cajole them, to curry favor with them, to all but beg them to care.
In my final years of teaching, I made a point of halfway admitting this on the first day of each new semester. No class can succeed without the professor’s careful preparation, I told them, and I promised I would always be prepared (no matter how it looked), but at the same time, no class could succeed without their willingness to get into the spirit of things either. In other words, we needed each other.
I did my best. After my first, disastrous semester of teaching in graduate school, I enrolled in a three-year program at our University’s teaching resource center, and later I read books like Engaging Ideas and spent what time I could preparing for class, putting pedagogical ideas into practice.
When a class went really well, I was elated. After a particularly good session in which we compared the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, I wandered around the quad in a daze, until a friend stopped me and asked me why I was practically shining. On days like that I would have said that I loved teaching too.
But they were too few and far between. Even though I did my best to invent creative questions, activities, and assignments, I usually felt like I was marching each class forward one step at a time, in a straight line, checking to make sure nobody got lost or left behind. I did not like playing the commandant, and cracking jokes to win the students’ attention always felt cheap.
The truth is I expected to enjoy teaching much more than I did, probably on the grounds that I had always enjoyed being in classes so much. It was understandable but wrong-headed reasoning. As a student, I always approached the classroom in the spirt of play, and to this day there is nothing I enjoy more than playing with ideas, batting them around in the air and running after them with my friends. How long can we keep these ideas in the air? How far will they go? Where will they take us?
Teaching wasn’t like that. Being in class felt like play without responsibility, while teaching felt like responsibility without play. I do not miss it at all.
These are all abstract ideal types (except for the last one, maybe). No one professor embodies any of them perfectly, though it is also possible to exemplify a few at once, and I suspect that every professor falls into each category at one time or another. Myself included. (Have I ever been above getting a cheap laugh and then basking in it?) And I’m equally sure that there are moments when every professor is overjoyed just to see a student’s face light up with the special excitement that comes with comprehending a new idea, and thus the world, in a new way.
On some level, I am not describing anything rare here. The wish to avoid inconvenient truths and uncomfortable questions, the desire for attention and recognition, the love of power—these are very general features of human nature. This is only how they strut and fret their hour across the classroom’s stage.
I wish to reiterate in closing that teaching is a noble vocation, Ainsley. It just wasn’t mine.
Paul