. . .
Partly since the two universities where I have taught have had very different but very effective extracurricular stimuli to get the maximum yardage out of their teachers, I have had the privilege of observing some remarkable teaching in my time, a good deal of it done by some present today.
For some years after I started out on my observation tours I saw nothing in common between one great teacher and another. For instance, Wayne Booth, who gave us this morning one of the few fine convocation speeches I have ever heard, walks into his classroom, takes off his coat, hangs it on the back of the chair, sits on the corner of his desk, which he uses as a launching pad.
But his great master—and mine, too, for that matter—was R. S. Crane, and he couldn’t have been more formal. He wore a tall starched collar and I can still see the tip of his gold collar button only partially hidden under the knot of his tie.
Joe Schwab punches a student all over the ring until he finally gets him in a corner and disposes of him. So Joe Schwab teaches like a prize fighter.
But Tom Hutchinson taught like an architect. He began his lectures just as the bell rang and his last word came just as it rang again and, when you looked back over it, all the parts were there in just the right order and size, and it had the beauty that comes from something built in serenity.
So you can teach like a prize fighter and be a great teacher, or you can teach like an architect and be a great teacher, or you can be a great teacher in shirt sleeves or in back of a gold collar button. It seems you can do about anything and be a great teacher.
But if you like to go around watching great teachers, as I used to when I could sit longer in one place than I can now, you will eventually see certain common characteristics emerging amid all the variety of gymnastic techniques. And, on the basis of some of the more obvious of these common characteristics, I am willing to make a rough description of a great teacher just to get started on this part of the subject. Later I hope to refine it, but I’ll start by saying that a great teacher is a tough guy who cares deeply about something that is hard to understand.
To vivify what I have just said, I think I’ll take one of the most popular and flamboyant of undergraduate teachers in our College’s history. I take him in deference to Mr. Bate, whose honorary degree was awarded today in part because he is one of the world’s most renowned scholars and teachers of early 19th century Romanticism.
Teddy Linn of long ago had no such distinction as a scholar, but what he lacked in scholarship about Romanticism he made up in being a flamboyant version of Romanticism itself. It was forty-five years ago this autumn when I went to observe his opening class in his favorite course in the English Romantic poets, and I remember the class as if it had been held yesterday. Well, I don’t remember the first few minutes of the class, because those of us who hadn’t seen him in action before were worried that the cigarette on the edge of his lip would burn his lip in another half-inch, but the cigarette evidently always went out in another quarter of an inch and stuck there the rest of the hour.
Mr. Linn, in his introduction to Romanticism, mentioned no such aged and agricultural figures as Wordsworth, and he said nothing on the opening day about Coleridge and German metaphysics, although Coleridge and Wordsworth came first chronologically. For his opening words, he jumped the first generation of English Romantic poets and went straight for Keats.
Keats was dead, he said, when he was no older than some of them in the class and only a few years older than most of them. He was immortal at an age when they did well to get C plus on a theme in English composition because it had no split infinitives or dangling participles. He said that despite this notable difference, they and Keats were one in that Keats gave the finest expression in all literature of what was best in them. He said when you grew older, as he had, you grew used to things, but youth trembled at the beauty of the earth, even when death stood close by. And he said Keats knew he was dying, and he recited the “Ode to Melancholy” and repeated the final stanza which begins
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
Then he told them a story, somewhat apocryphal, I am sure, but so spiritually true that I—and I am sure the rest of the class—will never forget it. He told them how Keats had been sent to Rome when it was discovered he was dying of tuberculosis, and how an art student friend of his by the name of Severn nursed him in his last illness. And how one day Severn had gone out shopping, and when he came back he found Keats leaning on his elbow staring at his pillow. And when Severn got closer to the bed he saw that Keats had hemorrhaged while he had been gone and so was staring at his life blood. Then suddenly Keats either saw or felt that Severn was present, and raised his head, and said, “Look, man, at that red against that white.”
“And so,” Mr. Linn said, “you will bring in a paper tomorrow on John Keats.” There was a long silence, and I am sure Mr. Linn knew how it was going to be broken. Finally, a fraternity pledge raised his hand and asked, “Did you say that paper is due tomorrow?”
“That’s right,” Mr. Linn said. “Tomorrow. That’s just to let you know what big teeth your grandmother has.”
Everybody in class had his paper in the next day, and, although I never saw any of them, it’s a good bet that none of them was much good. But that wasn’t the idea.
I used this incident to illustrate my rough definition before discussing it, especially the ingredients of being tough and caring deeply.
When I say “tough,” I realize we are in an age when students seem to be demanding that teachers stroke the silk on their egos while serving them sherry with the other hand, and I have one favorable thing to say about all this—the students don’t seem to care whether the sherry is good or not, and after a while they tire of the whole business.
The truth is, no matter what students seem to be saying at the moment, they want things tough, too. A student has to be sick to want a teacher for a pal or a pet. Of course, students don’t care to be roughed up just to give somebody else pleasure, and by being tough I don’t mean being rude or unsympathetic, although I want to make clear that I do not feel any compunction about being courteous to all people at all times, either in a classroom or anywhere else. You treat students the way you treat other people—the way you think they deserve to be treated.
I would be glad to argue this matter psychologically or even philosophically. Outside, just ahead of the student is the world of lumps-and-bumps. Is day-care what he needs most at this stage of the game to help him be ready? And, if so, just where did we acquire the breast-development to give it to him? But I am not really looking for arguments today. I have included “toughness” in the definition of great teachers because, on observation, I have found it one of their few common characteristics.
Some years ago I had a student by the name of Liz Ginsburg. She was a great handsome, intelligent girl who remains one of my all-time favorites. I hadn’t seen her for some time, so when I ran into her I asked, “Liz, what are you doing this quarter?” And she looked at me a little glassy-eyed and said, “This quarter I am taking McKeon,” which, as all of us know who have been students of his, is just a refined way of saying, “This quarter McKeon is taking me.”
What a great compliment for a great and tough teacher! Would that the campus were alive with large, handsome intelligent girls murmuring, “This quarter I am taking Maclean.”
Then I also want to say a little about the part of the definition that has to do with caring deeply about something hard to understand. This is the part without which there is nothing. In this student-oriented age when we are all huddled together with “togetherness,” I should like to step slightly apart and say I have seen great teachers who didn’t care much about students, including America’s first Nobel Prize winner, Albert Abraham Michelson.
There was another eminent scientist who by legend found teaching very disturbing because, as he said, “Every
time I remember the name of a student I forget the name of a fish.” But, according to the legend, he was also a fine teacher, and, if the account is true, he became the first president of Stanford.
Most teachers like some students for some reason or other, and the reverse is true—most students have a few teachers they like, sometimes for very obscure reasons. But, in the legend, our scientific president of Stanford was a fine teacher because he liked fish, and you can’t be one unless you do. And in addition have, as you can see he had, the power of conveying his feelings about fish.
On the other hand, I don’t want to push a teacher to a place where he has to publish or perish. After all, if it had not been for students of his, Socrates would have had no bibliography. Perhaps that is why he didn’t get tenure. If one becomes contemporary and looks at the list of Quantrell award winners in a disinterested way, he finds that of the 127, perhaps half also have the distinction as scholars. The count could vary five or ten one way or the other, depending upon how one feels about friendship while he is counting, but that roughly is the proportion, and it is roughly the proportion I have seen to exist among the great university teachers I have observed in something over half a century of counting.
TEACHERS’ GENES
It is for my half of this proportion that I should like to say a few words. But just to get the cards dealt fairly before we begin this game, let me add that, during the same half century of observation, something less than half of the great scholars have not been great teachers, or even very good ones, a fact which has left the world somewhat short of very good teachers.
Now, as to the particular fraction for which I was going to speak. First of all, we believe that scholarship should and does pervade this university and other great universities. Secondly, we think that in some fundamental senses we are scholars, but, for this to be true, scholarship has to exist in several fundamental senses besides the conventional one that results in a long bibliography.
No matter how we think of scholarship, we must at least think of it as the discovery of truth, and in the conventional sense this discovery should also be a discovery of some significance to our colleagues. It is in this sense that we say that a great university is known for its great scholars and that a person is—if he is—a great scholar and a great teacher.
But a teacher must have a wider range of discovery than this. A teacher must forever be making discoveries to himself—he must have a gene marked “Freshness of the World.”
And then he must have another gene that gives him the power to lead students to making discoveries—ultimately, he hopes, to the power of self-discovery. This gene might be marked, “You-Don’t-Say-So?” However, many of these stirring discoveries may have been made, indeed should have been made, before by other men and women, and hence are not publishable in a scholarly journal.
Now there is this third gene marked, “The Best and Freshest on the Subject.” As a minimum, the great teacher must have a half of this gene—the half that gives him command of the best that is known among his colleagues. However, he may or may not have the other half of the gene which leads him as a minimum to a hankering after immortality in a footnote.
I should like to leave this part of the subject in language that does not echo the “publish or perish” controversy, and so I shall say that the great teacher should care as much as any man for his subject and be able to convey his pleasure in it far better than most.
Perhaps a Freudian way could be found to describe the great teacher that would at least be more interesting than measuring the length of his bibliography. There is no greater commonplace from Freud than that in the beginning we are all Id, the principle of pleasure and lust, and the Ego, the principle of reason and sanity, comes later and is only a feeble outgrowth of the Id, is always subservient to it, and is developed only to protect the Id from the censure of society and to allow it the maximum fulfillment in a world where orgy is a bad word.
But long before I reached the age of retirement I realized the reverse of this can be a second truth. The ego can become so powerful that it can woo the id and make pleasure a servant of reason and sanity. The reason can become so powerful and fancy that it can make love to the id and say, “Look at me. Feel my muscles and see how graceful and beautiful I am. As for gifts, I can bring you samples of the moon. Forget about women’s lib and come along and pledge to love, honor and obey me, and consider yourself lucky.” I would be willing, then, I think, to consider the art of teaching as the art of perverting nature, as nature is given to us by St. Sigmund, and I would accept, not wholeheartedly I admit, a definition of teaching as the art of enticing the ego to seduce the id into its services.
. . .
My father, I am sure, however, would have had nothing to do with such a definition. As a Presbyterian minister, he would have remained aloof from any definition that began with seduction and ended with the id. What he would have said would have been something more or less like this: “Teaching is the art of conveying the delight that comes from an act of the spirit (and from here on the Presbyterianism gets thicker), without ever giving anyone the notion that the delight comes easy.”
Although I realize the variety of religious experience present here today, I shall end on this Presbyterian note. So teaching will remain as the art of conveying the delight that comes from an act of the spirit, without ever giving anyone the notion that the delight comes easy.
But all I really know about teaching is that, to do it well, supposedly you should change your necktie every day of the week.
“Billiards Is a Good Game”*
GAMESMANSHIP AND AMERICA’S FIRST NOBEL PRIZE SCIENTIST
Maclean was particularly proud of his portrait of Albert Abraham Michelson, the first American scientist to win the Nobel Prize. Maclean used to watch Michelson play billiards downstairs in the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club during Maclean’s first year on the faculty (1928). He occasionally said that he thought “‘Billiards Is a Good Game’” was one of the best things he’d written.
When I came here in 1928, now more than half the history of the University ago, the University of Chicago was the one institution of higher learning that was thought to exist west of the Appalachians by the populace east of the Appalachians. This widespread recognition was based largely on the names of Leopold and Loeb, Clarence Darrow (who in the eastern mind was also connected with the University of Chicago), A. A. Stagg, and Albert Abraham Michelson, who in 1907 had been the first American to win the Nobel Prize in science. Before arriving on campus, I may also have heard of Arthur Holly Compton, because only the year before he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, but I have the feeling I did not know of him until I saw Mrs. Compton showing him off at intermissions in Mandel Hall.
Michelson and Einstein, however, were the best known scientists of the time—in some ways for almost opposite reasons, although both were physicists. Einstein was the wonder of the world because he had encased the whole universe in a simple formula, E = mc2, which we were told, equally wonderful to us, would be very upsetting if we could understand it. Especially to us who could not understand, he was the theorist beyond theorists.
Michelson’s wonder was what his head did with his hands, and a few boxes and rotating mirrors. He measured things, especially things that were regarded as unmeasurable, ineffable, and precious as life itself. Among other things, he had measured light and a star. I watched him play billiards nearly every noon for several months before he retired from the University, and, in introducing myself, I could further say with equal truth, “Shake the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan.” If I get the right opening, though, I prefer saying, “When young, I watched Michelson play billiards.”
Michelson’s hands were to make many things that brought light to our universe, but nothing so marked him in the popular mind as his measurement of the speed of light itself. Throughout most of history, light had been thought of as instantaneous and present wherever there was nothing to cast a sha
dow, and probably throughout all history light will be thought of by poets and the rest of us as the source of body and soul, without which there would be no photosynthesis or food or love or moonlight in which to make love. Without light for a metaphor there would have been little poetry written and no candlelight to write it by. Christ said, “I am the light of the world,” and Cardinal Newman’s hymn to Him begins, “Lead, kindly light.”
Michelson was to measure the speed of light many times (his most accurate figure being 186,285 ± 2½ miles per second) and modern electronic equipment has changed that figure to only 186,282.3960. When in 1878 as an ensign in Annapolis he made his first measurement he spent $10.00 of his own money to assemble his equipment (for $10.00 light measured 186,508 miles per second).
In 1928, three years before his death, everyone said of Michelson, “He measured light,” and today he is one of the few Nobel Prize winners whom nearly all educated people can name and give the reason for the award, although Michelson’s award actually was based on a wide spectrum of experiments. His youngest daughter showed her father’s own sense of truth and artistry when she entitled her recent biography of him, The Master of Light. Of course, the fact that he was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in science helped to enshrine him both nationally and locally. Nowadays Nobel Prize winners at times seem to come a dime a dozen and every now and then in job-lots, two or three to an award, but for a long time in history there was none and then there was one and he was at the University of Chicago. President Harper himself had started the University on its long string of firsts—the first university to have a summer school, the first extension division organized as part of a university, the first university press to have its own press, and, certainly not least or last, the first university to have women on its faculty and a dean of women. But probably the University’s two most unforgettable firsts go to Michelson for the first American Nobel Prize in science (1907) and to Enrico Fermi and his group for the first self-sustained nuclear reaction (1942). To include one of my old students, I’ll add Jay Berwanger for the first Heisman Trophy (1935).
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 11