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Thomas Carruthers said that "a teacher is one who makes
himself progressively unnecessary."
What does that mean?
How does that mean?
Alan
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From the issue dated 2/14/2003
A Teacher Learns to Let Her Students Be
By NATALIE HARRIS
When I first began teaching college English, I wasn't much
older than my students. I worked at looking and sounding
authoritative, going so far as to imitate not only the
teaching methods but also the speech patterns (stopping just
short of the heavy Brooklyn accent) of my favorite English
professor. I'd show those students I had something to teach
them! But did I? Well, yes, but it was mainly the knowledge
I'd acquired from my own teacher, Mr. G.
I had many good teachers, but none of them made the impact on
me that Mr. G. did. He was not only passionate, but he was
also funny -- hilariously devastating, in fact, in the face of
literature he didn't admire. The downside was that my mind
seemed so puny next to his (I tended to ignore the fact that I
was 17 years his junior), my readings of literature so
ordinary. It wasn't until years after my dissertation on Ezra
Pound that I discovered I didn't really enjoy much of the
highly intellectual poetry Mr. G. had taught me to decode.
When I first began teaching, the notes I'd taken in Mr. G.'s
classes became my bible. To make literature matter to my
students as intensely as Mr. G. had made it matter to me, I
believed I had to be as much like him as I could. That was the
selfless stage of my teaching career, a stage I'm relieved to
say is over. The good news was that I was passionate like Mr.
G. The bad news was that I was emotionally overinvested in my
students.
Without children of my own, and with the energy of a
twentysomething woman, I devoted megawatts of intellectual and
emotional energy to my students. After class, I'd try to
decipher the meaning of Valerie's compulsive leg swinging,
Thalia's perpetually raised eyebrow, Dan's grin, Eric's
furrowed brow. I devoted my weekends to preparing myself to
answer any question that anyone could possibly ask about the
poems I had assigned to my students.
"Get a life," my daughter would have said, had she been born
yet. And while it felt as if I had a life teaching my students
difficult poetry, I was, in fact, missing something vital --
my own creativity. Fear, insecurity, and insufficient
self-knowledge had conspired to hide it from me.
At the end of the '70s, when I started teaching, lecturing was
still the prevalent mode, which suited me just fine. I
expected my students to master the texts and to scribble
copious notes, as I had done. Yet some students resented my
assumptions as a teacher, and they tended to be very
intelligent, strong-willed females. They didn't agree with my
model of teaching; they weren't courteous, like most of my
students; they weren't interested in learning how to study
more effectively for my tests. They didn't want to absorb
material, but to have a dialogue with it, and they didn't want
to absorb my insights, but to express their own.
Valerie's relentless leg swinging and Thalia's scornful
expression were signs of their disaffection and anger. Those
two scared me, though I didn't show it. I simply stood my
ground.
During the next decade, teaching styles gradually changed:
Discussions replaced lectures, and take-home exams replaced
in-class exams. Once in my 30s, I no longer worried about
being mistaken for a college student, and I found my own voice
in the classroom. I enjoyed weaving a discussion's various
strains of opinion into a coherent whole. Feeling the
confidence that comes with authenticity, I worried less about
my authority in the classroom and became more committed to my
students' independence.
After my first child was born, my relationship to my students
changed still more. I no longer spent weekends holed up in my
study (which had become my daughter's bedroom), poring over
poems, checking the dictionary for nuances I might have
overlooked. Stroller rides and nursing sessions occupied me
instead. When I gave a talk at my college, the topic was
mothers and children in poetry. In front of my
American-literature class, I'd peek at my watch to see how
much time was left until I could pick up my daughter at the
baby sitter's.
Pam, the baby sitter, became the new authority I depended on.
I so leaned on her that I had nightmares in which she
disappeared and I didn't know what to do. It wasn't just that
I needed a baby sitter who was trustworthy and reliable. I see
now that I also needed someone to show me the proper
relationship between caring for a child and fostering her
autonomy -- as I had learned to nurture my students yet give
them their independence.
Pam seemed a natural at that, always encouraging the children
she cared for to do whatever they could on their own: "Go
ahead, Susan, take your yogurt snack out of the fridge. Please
put away the Ritz Bits, Alison." And there they would go,
happily doing what, at home, I would automatically do for my
child.
My own mother was as warm and attentive as Pam. But unlike
Pam, my mother did not encourage independence. Her impulse was
to do everything for me -- conveying the message that I wasn't
competent to fend for myself. Now I see that whatever part my
mother played in making me who I am, I have always struggled
to find the right balance between dependency and autonomy.
Because I distrusted my own resources, as a teacher and as a
mother, I felt intensely in need of those who seemed to
possess the know-how I lacked.
Time and experience have shown me that not only did I deflate
my own capacities, but I also inflated those of my mentors.
Mr. G. was, indeed, a gifted teacher, and he remains a highly
valued part of my life. Yet he became so embittered by his
university that he retired early and turned to training dogs
for a living. I eventually saw that Pam did not have all the
answers, either. She divorced her husband and married a
high-school sweetheart, who abused her until he was curbed
with a restraining order. I know that she continues to be a
devoted mother, just as Mr. G. is a highly regarded teacher of
dog owners and a devoted friend to me. But they have no hot
lines to heaven, no more power to make things go right than
anyone else -- including me.
My challenge as a teacher and mother, as I see it now, is to
guide my charges responsibly and wholeheartedly, without
asking that they fulfill my idea of what they should be or
know -- so that, unlike me, they will trust themselves.
That's easy to say. It's not even so hard to do now, when I
put on my teacher's hat. Teachers have the opportunity to be
intellectually and emotionally engaged with their students,
without the complex, history-laden entanglements that make
disinterest so difficult in parent-child relationships.
Students tell me sometimes that they want to major in English,
but their parents are pressuring them toward more-practical
choices, like economics or education or biology. Or that they
want to take some time off from school, but their parents tell
them not to -- fearful that their absence from academe might
not make their hearts grow fonder of it. Recently, a student
confided that it was frustrating to read about peoples' lives
instead of really living.
"So live!" I tell my students. I refer them to James Baldwin's
story "Sonny's Blues." Playing jazz is the only thing Sonny
wants to do, he tells his older brother, who replies like an
anxious parent: "You know people can't always do exactly what
they want to do." Sonny responds, "No, I don't know that. ...
I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are
they alive for?"
"Do what you want to do," I urge my students. "Follow your
bliss," as Joseph Campbell used to say. That is strenuous
advice, requiring one to leave behind mother and father,
mentor, and accustomed comforts to find what is essential,
even sacred, to the self. I know how important that is, and
also how challenging, because I did it myself.
Close to 20 years after getting my Ph.D., I realized that I
wanted not only to read, interpret, and talk about literature,
but also to write it. I had told myself that I appreciated
good literature too much to risk writing bad stuff, that I was
intelligent but not imaginative, that I didn't have anything
to write about. But I found myself turning a theoretical essay
into fiction. I got an M.F.A. and found my own voice as a
writer, many years after finding it as a teacher.
Still, I find it hard to tell my children what I tell my
students: "Live! Follow your bliss!" That is especially the
case with my daughter, who is now readying herself for
college. Alison is a fine student and an exceptionally
perceptive young person. But I can't help seeing that she
could be trying harder, doing more, or doing it sooner or more
passionately. Under such a tyranny of expectation, of course,
she has to rebel, reminding me of leg-swinging Valerie and
scornful Thalia. Just as I've learned to do with my students,
I have to keep reminding myself to respect my children's
natures, to value their autonomy over my desires for them, my
sense of what they could do if they just saw things from a
broader perspective -- mine.
The last time I taught Tillie Olsen's famous story "I Stand
Here Ironing," my students saw the protagonist, a mother, as
insufficiently attentive to her growing daughter's needs. They
also saw the mother as loving, but trapped by social and
economic circumstances. All true. But what I couldn't help
stressing was the wisdom of the mother's words when she
rehearses what she would say to the teacher who has called her
in for a conference about her 19-year-old daughter, were she
to go: "Let her be." Three simple words spell out a path so
difficult for parents like me to follow, parents who commit
the common error of overinvolvement.
"Let her be," I repeat as a mantra, stilling my impulse to
lecture my daughter, to steer her in this direction or that.
She will find her way. Most college students do, by fumbling
and stumbling, all the while taking in more than they are
aware of, reflecting what we parents and teachers have given
them in forms we hardly recognize.
That is how it should be. Education is about transformation --
not into what we, as parents and teachers, may wish young
people to be, but into themselves.
Natalie Harris is an associate professor of English at Colby
College.
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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