Melissa Valiska Gregory

Forgetting, Learning, and Living: How Education Makes a Difference Even Though We Forget Most of What We Learn

Teaching is an ancient activity so thickly encrusted with multiple layers of history and conventions and narratives that it is difficult to see it with fresh eyes. American culture is awash in stories and stereotypes about schooling that range across personal anecdotes, TV programs, movies, and common stereotypes. References to these stories and stereotypes can and do pop up in nearly any venue or conversation. All of us are familiar with such images as the absent-minded humanities professor who mismatches his socks and never combs his hair, the nerdy science professor who burns acid holes in his neckties, the mean teachers, the prudes, the cool guys, the scary smart aristocratic types with a talent for humiliating students, or, finally, the sensitive teachers who (especially when played by glamorous, attractive actors) inspire their students to overcome unwanted pregnancies, abusive families, dirt-floor poverty, and school systems that have already counted them out. Our culture is so saturated with such myths, narratives, images, and stereotypes that it is difficult for real life teachers and real life students to see and own their own educational experiences.

What Is Teaching, After All?

Some readers may wonder why the chapter that asks “what is teaching, after all?” appears as Chapter 8 instead of Chapter 1. The reason is that the nuances and subtleties of the analysis I wish to offer here will resonate much more deeply (I think) now that I have taken time to discuss both my educational philosophy and many of teaching’s important dynamics in everyday classrooms. I hope my discussion here will be seen as an extension of arguments that I have been making from page one rather than as a pert and peppy way to give book buyers their money’s worth by offering a carry-away definition. Besides, my notion of what-teaching-is-after-all is not a starting point. It is a culmination, the consequence of many prior considerations.

Love? What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Perhaps the most difficult dynamic to see clearly in any classroom is the pulsing of love. When I say that teaching will not work without love, I realize that I am making a controversial claim. Some people’s gut response, and I hardly blame them, will be to instantly reject this claim, but I hope that by the time I have explained what I mean, even my most skeptical readers will grant that I have a legitimate case.

Good Teaching and Educational Vision: Not the Same Thing as Disciplinary Expertise

It was 8:00 A.M. on a bright Monday morning in the fall of 1967 and I was actually awake, but it felt unnatural and weird. (My grad-student body was incredulous that 8:00 A.M. could be considered a reasonable time for human beings to be up and working.) I was standing in front of a class of first-year students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I had been hired—on a tenure track appointment, no less—to teach writing. As I watched the students file in, I was possessed by a growing insight, ironic but not comic, that none of the highly intellectualized activities I had been performing for the past few years at the University of Chicago were relevant to this job or these students. None of my academic circus tricks seemed relevant. It crossed my mind that I might be acting out the punch line of a really unfunny joke perpetrated by University of Chicago professors to hide from graduate students the fact that, eventually, we would all wind up standing in front of classrooms of real-world students instead of sitting in library carrels at good old Research U, where we would continue nibbling away at reclusive research topics just as we had nibbled away at them in graduate school.

Teacherly Ethos Revisited

I discussed teacherly ethos back in Chapter 4, but ethos is so central to teaching excellence and to the argument of this book—it is so pervasive an influence in all classroom interactions—that a full account of its significance requires further and final analysis. Teacherly ethos is not so much about what a teacher should do (in an instrumental or methodological sense) as about who a teacher should be (in terms of character and virtue). Students care little about what methods their teachers use but do care immensely about what kinds of persons their teachers are. I have never heard a student apply the word “ethos” to their teachers, yet I know that it remains a primary student concern. I find in my seminars that this sometimes strikes teachers as unpleasant and even unfair: “What difference does it make what kind of person I am as long as I really know what I claim to know within my discipline?” Bad question. It misses the issues that lie at the center of both excellent teaching and effective learning.

The Dynamics of Desire in Everyday Classrooms

D. H. Lawrence’s evocative phrase from “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” (1911)—“life with its smoky burning”—offers a useful metaphor for the play of desires in everyday classrooms where students fixate on “what the teacher wants,”1 and where teachers get anxiety hives about covering all the material they have crammed into the syllabus. In this social and academic environment, both students and teachers (in my experience) are generally obtuse about the existence of multiple species of desire that swirl invisibly and powerfully around everyone in the classroom. This obtuseness about classroom desires is a potential danger for teachers the way obtuseness about clues regarding smoke and flame constitutes a danger for fire fighters. Not to pick up on the emotional temperature in one’s own classroom leaves the teacher unprepared to deal with smoldering emotions.

Developing Your Own Philosophy of Education: Principles, Not Personalities

Any reader who has made it this far—especially after the previous chapter on agape—will anticipate my skepticism of all views assuming that good pedagogy depends on personally intimate and emotionally intense interactions between students and teachers. In this skepticism, however, I am in the minority. We live in a culture in love with love and which tends to value feelings more than logic, reason, and evidence as credible guides to right conduct. Like the feel of sex and the taste of food, intense emotions are compelling to experience or observe, and many people assume that emotions possess a default legitimacy on the grounds of intensity alone. Moreover, our culture combines its prejudice in favor of rhapsodic emotions with its endless appetite for celebrity worship in a way that turns celebrity watching into a kind of pop art form for the ceaseless expression of our passion for passion. It is a disquieting thought but an obvious truth that there are millions of people in America who really care about whether or not well-known celebrity couples are having affairs, getting married, getting divorced, getting fat, getting thin, getting drunk, getting sober, getting religion, looking bad, looking good, having liposuction, having babies, getting rich, getting bored, getting it on, or just getting along.