more thoughts on teaching

Yesterday after a meeting Cynthia and I went over to RUB BBQ for a late lunch where I found the fried green tomato batter to be reminiscent of the crusty deliciousness of McNuggets. I told her stories about teaching and she told me about the N+1 reading last night which she attended with a well-respected, non-best selling novelist. After a while I speculated aloud about teaching and its relationship to professions and fields such as writing, fine art, and architecture. Teaching being the end of what you do rather than a means is what a student needs rather than some guy, no matter how talented, who sees teaching as a way to remain financially viable to finish a book. Of course plenty of teachers just go through the motions of teaching as well, perhaps because we don't really think of something like education to be an art as well.

This morning while brushing my teeth I wondered if how often teachers admit their own mistakes to their students. Since I have such limited experience with teaching I notice these things every day and then try to make corrections. Some, or possibly most, of them are logistical, such as figuring out that I should have had students pick out a debate topic for class before the lunch break rather than after. I told the kids that after we reconvened for the afternoon, and they seemed to forgive my graft when I told them this. Do other teachers do this? I've noticed this a few times in graduate seminars, but I don't remember encountering this before.

I wonder how much we think that we have to present some sort of aura of greatness or infallability as teachers? I wonder if teachers think they need to do this even though I think students aren't going to necessarily respect that aura. So how many mistakes do we disclose to students?

john searle and the piraha

Reading and trying to write on Habermas created a curiosity about more analytic forms of philosophy of language, which I realize will be a pretty daunting and slow-moving task for quite a while. But John Searle of UC-Berkeley not only has some of his own writing up but a nice and easily palatable piece from the New Yorker I missed a few months ago on the Piraha people of Brazil and what might be their, as far as we know, singularity in the world regarding language and culture. And it's in nice pdf so you can see all the photos.

disorganized thoughts on teaching

Last night for relief from my apartment that has no air conditioning I walked up, as I often do I intolerably hot evenings, to the Barnes and Noble on 7th Avenue to read magazine and gaze, but fail to work up the attention to read the first few pages of books that I really should read. In most case I end up picking a big from the Essays section and sitting in the Romance section, which is relatively untrammled, except by some kids who walk by and giggle at the covers and titles that include the word "sex."

My reading selection was disjunctive as I sat down with Joseph Epstein's Narcissus Leaves the Pool and read an essay on the comparative merits of talent and genius. But mainly I thought about another essay of his I had read, probably in the Weekly Standard, on teaching. In that piece Epstein claimed that the only thing he'd ever learned from any of his students was the fact that he jingled the change in his pockets. That statement is the type I come to expect from Epstein--a slightly disengaged curmudgeon in great style who does have a reason to be against those drippy statements from other educators who claim to learn so much from their students.

So the past two days I've been teaching philosophy to high school students in Columbia's Summer Program for High School Students, and so I've been trying to think what I've learned not only from the students but from the action of teaching. And by that I mean other things than the fact that I realize my voice is pretty shaky when I start talking in the morning.

The first this is that I am spending more time wondering how I appear to those eleven kids. This isn't a self-consciousness I feel around friends, family, or other adults. Mainly, sadly, the thing I think is, "Do these kids think I'm ugly?" Following closely are "Do they think my clothes are ugly?" and "Do they think I'm smart?" and "Am I boring?" This says a lot more about me, of course, than any of the students.

Since we're doing philosophy I've been telling them repeatedly that they are free to disagree with me and be open and vocal about their disagreement. But during lunch yesterday I realized that this was probably a disingenuous claim. Not from me, but from teachers in general who have probably made the very same claim before. So the first thing I told them after lunch was that I realized that a lot of teachers are just lying when they make that claim. They completely agreed.

Perhaps this is irresponsible of me, but I am completely uninvolved with moderating the debates we have during the afternoon sessions. Partially because I don't know anything about formal debate, but I stay out of it even when arguments come close to being racist or generally completely general. Part of me does this because I don't want to be a part of the debate and let the students debate (and I'll add they do a very good job at being respectful of others), but mainly because I (naively or not) figure that my students are 15 years old and have a lot of time ahead of them to become more sophisticated in their thinking, to experience more, and leave some old stuff behind. Trusting their intellectual and moral capabilities isn't difficult for me, and I have no reason to think them to be anything other than talented, sophisticated, and extremely bright students. And for every clunky and arguably offensive comment they make I hear a sophisticated argument, a claim that hadn't occurred to me. So I'm going to be an optimist.

Of course, and this is a strong qualification, I am teaching eleven students from affluent families who mainly attend private schools. And they're lovely kids. That's not a but, but it is something.

old age

Earlier this week I wandered into the periodicals room at Butler while taking a break from reading and started reading through Granta's issue of Best of Young American Novelists. The introduction notes that the jury chose to lower the age from 40 to 35 because the kids are so precocious these days. But also noted is that sixty percent of those selected for the British edition came from Oxford and Cambridge and many of the Americans came from Ivy League or similar undergraduate institutions. So really it means that the kids are so precocious because they come from the means to be precocious.

I write this while I'm getting ready to teach ninth and tenth graders ethics for Columbia's summer program for high schoolers, which is just about exclusively the offspring of the well-to-do.

modern art

Christopher Hawthorne is one of the few architecture critics worth reading.