Bruno from Bucks County Sends in This Week's Big Thirsty.
Q: Who was the one undergrad proffie who turned you on, got you interested in this terrible career? Do you think today's student would break his/her heart?
My favorite undergrad professor taught a senior capstone course in my field. When I talked to him about my grad school ambitions he told me "Lex, you're good enough to do it and do it well, but here's what you need to know." He was entirely, brutally honest about the job crisis, the exploitation of adjuncts and grad students, etc. etc. He was as passionate and omniscient about his subject matter as any professor I ever had, and unflappable (maybe a bit too permissive of snowflakery, or maybe just not bothered by much of anything). I aspire to be like him but, alas, I have neither the intellect nor the temperament to be anything but a pale (VERY PALE) imitation.
I wasn't turned on to teaching by a proffie, but by a HS teacher. Regardless of the source of my inspiration, I realized that elementary or secondary school was not for me. The only option was CC or university.
I know that he had a lot of faith in me because he kept sending students my way for private tutoring, starting when I was a sophomore. He must have seen something.
Since I started college at the CC down the road from my HS, I would pop onto campus to visit him from time to time, before they locked it down because of the idiocy of "today's students".
As for today's students, whether HS or undergrad, his 5'5", 105 lb badass self would still, to this day, have them pissing themselves if he looked at them funny. He didn't take any shit. I vividly remember him sending a student to the principal for being a persistent smart-ass and disrupting class. When said student made an under-his-breath comment on the way out the door, my teacher followed him out the door and chewed his ass like a drill sergeant. Yet, the next day, things were just fine between them. That was the thing. He could ride your ass, discipline you, do things that would make an emotional teen seethe for what should be weeks, yet once the incident was done, it was done. I'm not saying that he forgot, but he most definitely forgave, and had the personality to make you forgive. It never became personal.
He retired about five years after I graduated, at which point I lost contact with him. This has really got me thinking that I need to see if he's still around so I can thank him(and since he retired relatively young and was fit as you wouldn't believe, he could be around another 30 years).
Regardless of all of the misery, no matter how much bitching I do about the idiocy, the asshattery, the snowflakery, I do like what I do. Maybe I picked up a little of the forgive from him.
My favorite undergrad professor was my community college American history teacher. Mr. Hughes. Unbelievably talented guy. Funniest, smartest, etc. I adored him. He himself went to school with Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, which means that when I took his class he was probably about five years younger than I am now. Terribly old, I thought. Terribly, terribly old.
But so funny. So smart. I don't think he'd be a whit surprised at the way students are now. If he's still teaching, which he's probably not because he's actually old now, not just "I'm over 40 so 18-year-olds think I'm old" old.
Lord, when he started riffing on the names of the leaders of the Klan, I just about lost it. I would seriously go back to that classroom again right now. I almost became a historian because of him. But then I discovered it wasn't really history that I loved. I loved him and whatever he taught.
It was English that I loved, but that's another story.
I got interested in teaching because my dear old Dad was a teacher. He didn't handle the ‘60s well, and he retired when he reached 65 in 1970. This was shortly after a girl student he’d liked passed out at his feet from a drug overdose: he’d had quite enough. He had a good retirement, and died in 1994. He’d have been utterly heartbroken, bewildered, and disgusted by today’s students. Often, after having my nose rubbed in idiocy from a modern student, I’ve said thank goodness my Dad didn’t live to see this.
I got interested in science when I was 5 years old, during a visit to the dinosaur exhibit by Sinclair Oil at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. (Imagine my delight when by surprise in 1996 I discovered that the life-size plastic Stegosaurus still existed, at the front entrance of Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal, Utah: it’s too bad what’s since happened to the place’s roof.) My interest was furthered by visits to the dinosaur fossil collection at the American Museum of Natural History, where my Mom had taken classes from Roy Chapman Andrews. I switched fields into astronomy before I turned 6, during a visit to the Hayden Planetarium, and in one way or another, I’ve been an astronomer ever since.
My undergraduate professors did seemingly everything they could to prevent me from being an astronomer. They might have thought they were doing the right thing, since when I entered college in 1976, it was a bad time to be entering astronomy or space science. (The Apollo Project had been cancelled in 1972, the Space Shuttle wouldn’t start flying until 1981, and only about 1/3 of recent Ph.D. astronomers were getting jobs in astronomy.) This isn’t what I do with my own students. I do tell them that jobs in astronomy are scarce, but I do everything I can to help them, if they’ll commit to astronomy.
But then, my undergraduate profs were mostly a bunch of lazy old dullards who were abusing their tenure and coasting to retirement, who hadn’t done any research in many years, and who taught us a whole bunch of obsolete stuff, such as how to develop photographic plates. The phrase “electronic imaging” never passed their lips: nearly all of what I now teach I picked up on my own. My undergraduate profs would have been well at home with today’s students, since there were student-athletes then who were almost as dumb and lazy as the ones we have now. (This was at a university that called itself “the Harvard of the Midwest,” where I got a Big-Ten education at Ivy League prices.) I soldiered on very much in spite of them, and if I ever were to sink that low, I’d die of shame. Life loves its ironies, of course: now I have no shortage of students who squander the opportunities I knock myself out to make for them. God help and keep the United States of America.
Mine taught a brilliant freshman seminar in which I learned that literary criticism had METHODS. Before that I'd thought it was just taking about your feelings about books you pretended to have read -- fun, but unserious in the extreme. After Professor C was done with me I knew basic linguistics, stylistics, structuralism, and baby poststructuralism. The man, an assistant professor at the time, was brilliant and uncompromising, but also very kind.
Already, even back in them dinosaur days, there were slackers (as we called them then). One kid whom Professor C admonished after class for being rude galumphed down the hall shouting, "I hate this f---ing class!" I was standing there waiting to talk to Professor C, and he turned to me looking pained. "Is my class OK?" he asked, sort of humbly. I couldn't believe it. I informed him that that kid was a rich kid from [name that tony New York prep school] and didn't know shit about shit. It was my first window into the vulnerability of teaching -- that a man that smart could care for a red-hot minute what some idiot freshman from [okay, it was Dalton] thought of him.
Somehow that combination of ferocious intellect and humanity really got me, not to mention my new admiration for literary criticism, and so I was hooked. I never resented him for turning me on, or for mentioning that I should look into grad school, even though the market crashed 10 years later when I emerged with a Ph.D. He moved onto another job the following year, and all I regret is that I didn't have him as a mentor till I graduated.
Here's to you, Professor C. You're still teaching the Kids of Today, and I hope it's bearable.
I didn't have a professor who directly inspired me to enter the edu-ma-cation racket, but the two who most inspired me to think, "Hrmph. I'm kinda like that. Maybe I could pull this off," taught psych classes.
One of the professors, Chuck, filled the roles of both academic and fraternity advisor; he's constantly getting quoted in women's magazines, and he's locally famous for wearing a condom hat. What really impressed me about Chuck, though, is that a goofy fellow could also be so serious-minded.
The other prof, Dr. V., taught upper-division classes in my major and terrified everybody. He sported a full-on Grizzly Adams, always paused fractionally before speaking--kinda like Ah-nuld in The Terminator--and seemed as if he were dispassionately analyzing you, kinda like one would examine a bug pinned to a corkboard.
Both Chuck and Dr. V. are still teaching, so I'll make no projections about their views, but I'm sure that Chuck is still a dancin' fool and Dr. V. still looks perpetually nonplussed.
Marianna Brose was the first professor to teach me literature. I was extraordinarily lazy and dull, and nothing about college was enjoyable to me.
I remember one day she read Keats' "To Autumn" to us. We had been told to read it, but of course I hadn't. She paused at the end and asked what we thought of it. 20 of us sat there blankly.
She read it again, the whole thing.
More silence.
She started again and finished it for the third time in a row. Each reading was fantastic, full of passion and nuance. (She had acted when she was younger, and had a bawdy story about Errol Flynn.)
When she finished the third time she closed her book and walked over to a bank of big windows that opened on campus.
It was silent still; nobody dared move.
Finally I couldn't take the pressure.
"He's saying that Autumn's an okay time, like Spring or Summer. Just different," I said.
I knew then and now that it wasn't an exceptional insight, but Brose whirled around and headed back to her text.
"Yes," she said. "Now let's find out why."
My classmates glared at me.
She died in '05, and it's one of my more nagging regrets that I never made the time to write her as an adult to thank her for what that class in 1979 meant to me.
No offense, but I think Cal is officially out on the page anyway, if you remember the great RYS article he did for the Chronicle last year.
And that story about Marianna Brose is lovely.
I have some of the same regrets about not letting my early proffies know how much they meant to the dreamy and scattered girl who sat in the back row and stared at her trapper-keeper.
But I've tried to make up for it with my grad school profs who really brought a lot out of me.
I actually emailed one of my undergrad philosophy professors late in the summer to thank him for the advice he gave me 19 years ago: "Don't become a lawyer, it'll kill you."
It was the early 90s as I was preparing for the GRE and thinking about applying to law school, too. I had a double major in Philosophy and Hamster Weaving, and thought being a lawyer would be a good use of my education. I was surprised when he said "Don't".
I said, "You think I don't have the heart for it?"
His response: "You have too much heart--"
He was right. So this summer I tracked him down and wrote: "Dear Dr. E: I hope you remember me, because I wanted to share good news: I was granted tenure this year, and am now an associate professor of Hamster Weaving. I really have found the fullest expression of my life's purpose as a teacher...I even teach a Modernist Hamster Weaving course with existentialism as the main theme, and that's because of you."
He did remember me, "quick smile and bright eyes," touched that I'd contacted him.
I have contacted other profs from grad school to share the good news, and they're happy for me too--but Dr. E was the person who helped to set my feet on this path. He's still teaching, now in a position as chair of philosophy and teaching part time in Hamster Weaving, too.
This may be the best Thirsty ever. I wish I had something to contribute, but I'd have to say the folks who made the greatest difference for me were grad student TAs. I guess that's what happens when you go to large state U. They are the ones who inspired me to go to graduate school. I think the professors I had inspired me to NOT end up at a large state U, and I guess I'm thankful to them for that.
I'll second the TA comment. I had some very cool and relaxed TAs who still put a lot of work into teaching. It never occurred to me how hard that job was (balancing first ever teaching and grad school) until I had to do it.
FFF: those dinosaurs inspired me as well. I was sure I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up! A couple months ago I saw a pamphlet from the Sinclair Oil exhibit at an antique shop and bought it just for the heck of it.
What teachers inspired me? A couple High School teachers who put such energy into their classes and a couple college professors who also really loved the subject. They made me realize how much fun their subject was and so cemented my love for the same.
And I bet they could inspire some of today's students as well...
Like Zeke, I went to a place where the people with whom undergrads interacted most directly were grad students and assistant professors who weren't going to get tenure (because almost no one got tenure by being promoted at that school anyway, and because those I got to know, and like, weren't treating teaching as an annoying distraction from their research). So I mostly came away knowing that, while I'd like to be a professor somewhere (based mostly on my enjoyment of research and writing), I didn't want to be an assistant professor at my alma mater or anywhere like it, even in the unlikely event that I had that opportunity (and I didn't have any illusions of being hired to tenure there either). So the whole "Hey! I could be him/her in a decade or two" thing doesn't quite work. While I thought I'd be able to find a job (I had one of those fellowships designed to help alleviate the shortage in humanities proffies predicted for the early '90s), I also went into the whole thing with a degree of caution, not quite sure where I'd fit, or that I'd yet met someone whose career trajectory I'd want to emulate, though I did know that, like them, I wanted to take the teaching part of the job seriously.
As far as I can tell after a bit of googling, the people who gave me their time and energy when I was an undergrad, and so helped me along the path to graduate school, are all still very actively dealing with today's students, both in the classroom and as the directors of programs and departments (which doesn't surprise me, given the civic-mindedness they shared). One has recently returned to the classroom after several decades as a Dean. It's hard to tell from pictures, but they generally look happy, and not shockingly aged by the experience or heartbroken or anything like that. It's also worth noting, as Cal's tale suggests, that teaching intro classes to freshmen who don't really want to be in said classes has never been an easy task, even if some of the ways in which it isn't easy change over time.
I have a picture of my undergraduate mentor up over my desk. He used to set up appointments to go over what I'd missed when I skipped a class. Thanks to his confidence that I could actually learn this stuff, I started coming to class again, and thirty years or so later, here I am teaching it. I met him for coffee whenever I went back home to visit the folks, and we would catch up on stuff; he was an invaluable source of advice and inspiration through my grad school days and throughout my career.
I thought he was immortal. It was an awful shock to me when one of my old students, now a grad student at his school, emailed me 2 years ago to tell me that he had died unexpectedly a couple of days before. I cried for three days. He'd only retired a couple of years before.
Could he deal with today's students? Sure. He never had any illusions about students, how interested they were, how much work they were likely to do, how much they were likely to try to get away with. He knew all about entitlement; he was an old private school alum himself and had been surrounded by those kids in his youth. He didn't let these things rattle him.
@Merely: I think you've hit on an important point: it's not just the students who have changed; it's also the proffies. We're much less likely, as a group, to be privileged in various ways, not only socioeconomic/educational background, but also gender, tenure status/eligibility, semester-to-semester job security, etc. And, at an institutional level, our opinions have lost weight and status, while the students' opinions have gained both. I suppose there will always be professors idealistic enough to have their hearts broken by students, but, given our generally diminished status, there are probably a growing number of us who could manage to be more unflappable -- and maintain higher standards -- if we had even a fraction of the institutionally-conferred authority that our predecessors did.
I will write nothing about myself, but I have to say it's damn good to hear from Froderick Frankenstien.* I never got too deep into Astronomy because of my poor maths, but the (self-imposed) backwardness of your undergrad instructors is appalling; photos only, no scanning equipment, screw that. _ _______________________
* I hope that Bubbles the chimp survived orbit and returned safe and sound. I myself want to send newts to the Far Side of the Moon; perhaps they will mutate and learn to live in a vacuum, or at least grow into monstrosities that will eat the taikonauts when the Chinese deign to send them.
Mine was my freshman Intro to Shakespeare professor. We read ten plays that semester, including Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. It wasn't until I was a faculty member myself that I realized inflicting this particular lineup of texts on freshmen was completely fucking insane.
Whatever. I loved it. I think all Shakespeareans remake the Bard in our own image, and the Shakespeare he introduced us to was cynical and slyly subversive, a man who sided with the common soldiers against the kings, and who didn't believe a word of what he made Ulysses say about degree. I took his epic poetry class a year later, and that was fantastic as well, but it's Shakespeare that has stayed with me.
He was the first teacher I ever had who swore in class. He played a fierce devil's advocate, and adored slaying sacred cows and grinding them into hamburger. Students either loved or hated him. He was a notoriously tough grader, but also made it clear that he didn't believe in grades: as far as he was concerned, they were for the benefit of employers and bureaucrats, not students.
He was always five minutes late to class. He'd be out on the front porch of the English building, smoking and drinking his coffee, and he'd lose track of time. He generally came in rambling. We got to hear about Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare, and how they never had any pictures of Cressida; and about the freshman humanities requirement at his alma mater, thirty years earlier. Somehow an explanation of epic similes turned into a discussion of sheep's milk cheese. By way of explaining his lateness, one day, he asked, rhetorically, how you were supposed to get from The Scarlet Letter to The Odyssey in fifteen minutes. By the end of the class, I'd worked out an extended comparison between Odysseus and Chillingworth, and approached him, rather shyly, to offer it up. That was the day he told me I ought to think about grad school.
He'd been married and divorced five times. I suspect at least some of them were his former students. I came to his office after my boyfriend dumped me a week before Christmas senior year, leaving me with a stack of grad school applications and a half-bottle of cheap vodka for consolation. He told me it had been scientifically proven that heartbreak was good for the circulation, but I didn't need that at my age, and proceeded to flirt with me in the completely harmless way that you can only flirt with a girl more than thirty years your junior. Of course he shouldn't have done that. But it helped immensely, and I still treasure the memory. He also quoted Adrienne Rich when we were discussing the Iliad, and ran a classroom that was a far friendlier place for a young feminist than most of the women's studies classes I took.
He's still teaching, although he's been semi-retired for a few years and is, I think, technically contingent faculty. I'm glad he's still around. I suppose they don't let anyone smoke on the front porch any more. That makes me sad. I hope nobody told him to tone it down or come to class on time or watch what he said to the female students when he gave up tenure.
My favorite undergrad professor taught a senior capstone course in my field. When I talked to him about my grad school ambitions he told me "Lex, you're good enough to do it and do it well, but here's what you need to know." He was entirely, brutally honest about the job crisis, the exploitation of adjuncts and grad students, etc. etc. He was as passionate and omniscient about his subject matter as any professor I ever had, and unflappable (maybe a bit too permissive of snowflakery, or maybe just not bothered by much of anything). I aspire to be like him but, alas, I have neither the intellect nor the temperament to be anything but a pale (VERY PALE) imitation.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't turned on to teaching by a proffie, but by a HS teacher. Regardless of the source of my inspiration, I realized that elementary or secondary school was not for me. The only option was CC or university.
ReplyDeleteI know that he had a lot of faith in me because he kept sending students my way for private tutoring, starting when I was a sophomore. He must have seen something.
Since I started college at the CC down the road from my HS, I would pop onto campus to visit him from time to time, before they locked it down because of the idiocy of "today's students".
As for today's students, whether HS or undergrad, his 5'5", 105 lb badass self would still, to this day, have them pissing themselves if he looked at them funny. He didn't take any shit. I vividly remember him sending a student to the principal for being a persistent smart-ass and disrupting class. When said student made an under-his-breath comment on the way out the door, my teacher followed him out the door and chewed his ass like a drill sergeant. Yet, the next day, things were just fine between them. That was the thing. He could ride your ass, discipline you, do things that would make an emotional teen seethe for what should be weeks, yet once the incident was done, it was done. I'm not saying that he forgot, but he most definitely forgave, and had the personality to make you forgive. It never became personal.
He retired about five years after I graduated, at which point I lost contact with him. This has really got me thinking that I need to see if he's still around so I can thank him(and since he retired relatively young and was fit as you wouldn't believe, he could be around another 30 years).
Regardless of all of the misery, no matter how much bitching I do about the idiocy, the asshattery, the snowflakery, I do like what I do. Maybe I picked up a little of the forgive from him.
My favorite undergrad professor was my community college American history teacher. Mr. Hughes. Unbelievably talented guy. Funniest, smartest, etc. I adored him. He himself went to school with Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, which means that when I took his class he was probably about five years younger than I am now. Terribly old, I thought. Terribly, terribly old.
ReplyDeleteBut so funny. So smart. I don't think he'd be a whit surprised at the way students are now. If he's still teaching, which he's probably not because he's actually old now, not just "I'm over 40 so 18-year-olds think I'm old" old.
Lord, when he started riffing on the names of the leaders of the Klan, I just about lost it. I would seriously go back to that classroom again right now. I almost became a historian because of him. But then I discovered it wasn't really history that I loved. I loved him and whatever he taught.
It was English that I loved, but that's another story.
I got interested in teaching because my dear old Dad was a teacher. He didn't handle the ‘60s well, and he retired when he reached 65 in 1970. This was shortly after a girl student he’d liked passed out at his feet from a drug overdose: he’d had quite enough. He had a good retirement, and died in 1994. He’d have been utterly heartbroken, bewildered, and disgusted by today’s students. Often, after having my nose rubbed in idiocy from a modern student, I’ve said thank goodness my Dad didn’t live to see this.
ReplyDeleteI got interested in science when I was 5 years old, during a visit to the dinosaur exhibit by Sinclair Oil at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. (Imagine my delight when by surprise in 1996 I discovered that the life-size plastic Stegosaurus still existed, at the front entrance of Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal, Utah: it’s too bad what’s since happened to the place’s roof.) My interest was furthered by visits to the dinosaur fossil collection at the American Museum of Natural History, where my Mom had taken classes from Roy Chapman Andrews. I switched fields into astronomy before I turned 6, during a visit to the Hayden Planetarium, and in one way or another, I’ve been an astronomer ever since.
My undergraduate professors did seemingly everything they could to prevent me from being an astronomer. They might have thought they were doing the right thing, since when I entered college in 1976, it was a bad time to be entering astronomy or space science. (The Apollo Project had been cancelled in 1972, the Space Shuttle wouldn’t start flying until 1981, and only about 1/3 of recent Ph.D. astronomers were getting jobs in astronomy.) This isn’t what I do with my own students. I do tell them that jobs in astronomy are scarce, but I do everything I can to help them, if they’ll commit to astronomy.
But then, my undergraduate profs were mostly a bunch of lazy old dullards who were abusing their tenure and coasting to retirement, who hadn’t done any research in many years, and who taught us a whole bunch of obsolete stuff, such as how to develop photographic plates. The phrase “electronic imaging” never passed their lips: nearly all of what I now teach I picked up on my own. My undergraduate profs would have been well at home with today’s students, since there were student-athletes then who were almost as dumb and lazy as the ones we have now. (This was at a university that called itself “the Harvard of the Midwest,” where I got a Big-Ten education at Ivy League prices.) I soldiered on very much in spite of them, and if I ever were to sink that low, I’d die of shame. Life loves its ironies, of course: now I have no shortage of students who squander the opportunities I knock myself out to make for them. God help and keep the United States of America.
Mine taught a brilliant freshman seminar in which I learned that literary criticism had METHODS. Before that I'd thought it was just taking about your feelings about books you pretended to have read -- fun, but unserious in the extreme. After Professor C was done with me I knew basic linguistics, stylistics, structuralism, and baby poststructuralism. The man, an assistant professor at the time, was brilliant and uncompromising, but also very kind.
ReplyDeleteAlready, even back in them dinosaur days, there were slackers (as we called them then). One kid whom Professor C admonished after class for being rude galumphed down the hall shouting, "I hate this f---ing class!" I was standing there waiting to talk to Professor C, and he turned to me looking pained. "Is my class OK?" he asked, sort of humbly. I couldn't believe it. I informed him that that kid was a rich kid from [name that tony New York prep school] and didn't know shit about shit. It was my first window into the vulnerability of teaching -- that a man that smart could care for a red-hot minute what some idiot freshman from [okay, it was Dalton] thought of him.
Somehow that combination of ferocious intellect and humanity really got me, not to mention my new admiration for literary criticism, and so I was hooked. I never resented him for turning me on, or for mentioning that I should look into grad school, even though the market crashed 10 years later when I emerged with a Ph.D. He moved onto another job the following year, and all I regret is that I didn't have him as a mentor till I graduated.
Here's to you, Professor C. You're still teaching the Kids of Today, and I hope it's bearable.
I didn't have a professor who directly inspired me to enter the edu-ma-cation racket, but the two who most inspired me to think, "Hrmph. I'm kinda like that. Maybe I could pull this off," taught psych classes.
ReplyDeleteOne of the professors, Chuck, filled the roles of both academic and fraternity advisor; he's constantly getting quoted in women's magazines, and he's locally famous for wearing a condom hat. What really impressed me about Chuck, though, is that a goofy fellow could also be so serious-minded.
The other prof, Dr. V., taught upper-division classes in my major and terrified everybody. He sported a full-on Grizzly Adams, always paused fractionally before speaking--kinda like Ah-nuld in The Terminator--and seemed as if he were dispassionately analyzing you, kinda like one would examine a bug pinned to a corkboard.
Both Chuck and Dr. V. are still teaching, so I'll make no projections about their views, but I'm sure that Chuck is still a dancin' fool and Dr. V. still looks perpetually nonplussed.
Marianna Brose was the first professor to teach me literature. I was extraordinarily lazy and dull, and nothing about college was enjoyable to me.
ReplyDeleteI remember one day she read Keats' "To Autumn" to us. We had been told to read it, but of course I hadn't. She paused at the end and asked what we thought of it. 20 of us sat there blankly.
She read it again, the whole thing.
More silence.
She started again and finished it for the third time in a row. Each reading was fantastic, full of passion and nuance. (She had acted when she was younger, and had a bawdy story about Errol Flynn.)
When she finished the third time she closed her book and walked over to a bank of big windows that opened on campus.
It was silent still; nobody dared move.
Finally I couldn't take the pressure.
"He's saying that Autumn's an okay time, like Spring or Summer. Just different," I said.
I knew then and now that it wasn't an exceptional insight, but Brose whirled around and headed back to her text.
"Yes," she said. "Now let's find out why."
My classmates glared at me.
She died in '05, and it's one of my more nagging regrets that I never made the time to write her as an adult to thank her for what that class in 1979 meant to me.
This is heartwarming. Thanks for the good thirsty and the comments.
ReplyDeleteNice story, Cal, but one more detail and you're going to out yourself.
ReplyDeleteNo offense, but I think Cal is officially out on the page anyway, if you remember the great RYS article he did for the Chronicle last year.
ReplyDeleteAnd that story about Marianna Brose is lovely.
I have some of the same regrets about not letting my early proffies know how much they meant to the dreamy and scattered girl who sat in the back row and stared at her trapper-keeper.
But I've tried to make up for it with my grad school profs who really brought a lot out of me.
A good lesson for all of us, I'd think.
I actually emailed one of my undergrad philosophy professors late in the summer to thank him for the advice he gave me 19 years ago: "Don't become a lawyer, it'll kill you."
ReplyDeleteIt was the early 90s as I was preparing for the GRE and thinking about applying to law school, too. I had a double major in Philosophy and Hamster Weaving, and thought being a lawyer would be a good use of my education. I was surprised when he said "Don't".
I said, "You think I don't have the heart for it?"
His response: "You have too much heart--"
He was right. So this summer I tracked him down and wrote: "Dear Dr. E: I hope you remember me, because I wanted to share good news: I was granted tenure this year, and am now an associate professor of Hamster Weaving. I really have found the fullest expression of my life's purpose as a teacher...I even teach a Modernist Hamster Weaving course with existentialism as the main theme, and that's because of you."
He did remember me, "quick smile and bright eyes," touched that I'd contacted him.
I have contacted other profs from grad school to share the good news, and they're happy for me too--but Dr. E was the person who helped to set my feet on this path. He's still teaching, now in a position as chair of philosophy and teaching part time in Hamster Weaving, too.
@Prickly & Darla,
ReplyDeleteOh, not to worry. Many folks know me on here. So I'm out. Even my lovely wife knows.
Cal
This may be the best Thirsty ever. I wish I had something to contribute, but I'd have to say the folks who made the greatest difference for me were grad student TAs. I guess that's what happens when you go to large state U. They are the ones who inspired me to go to graduate school. I think the professors I had inspired me to NOT end up at a large state U, and I guess I'm thankful to them for that.
ReplyDeleteI'll second the TA comment. I had some very cool and relaxed TAs who still put a lot of work into teaching. It never occurred to me how hard that job was (balancing first ever teaching and grad school) until I had to do it.
ReplyDeleteFFF: those dinosaurs inspired me as well. I was sure I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up! A couple months ago I saw a pamphlet from the Sinclair Oil exhibit at an antique shop and bought it just for the heck of it.
ReplyDeleteWhat teachers inspired me? A couple High School teachers who put such energy into their classes and a couple college professors who also really loved the subject. They made me realize how much fun their subject was and so cemented my love for the same.
And I bet they could inspire some of today's students as well...
Like Zeke, I went to a place where the people with whom undergrads interacted most directly were grad students and assistant professors who weren't going to get tenure (because almost no one got tenure by being promoted at that school anyway, and because those I got to know, and like, weren't treating teaching as an annoying distraction from their research). So I mostly came away knowing that, while I'd like to be a professor somewhere (based mostly on my enjoyment of research and writing), I didn't want to be an assistant professor at my alma mater or anywhere like it, even in the unlikely event that I had that opportunity (and I didn't have any illusions of being hired to tenure there either). So the whole "Hey! I could be him/her in a decade or two" thing doesn't quite work. While I thought I'd be able to find a job (I had one of those fellowships designed to help alleviate the shortage in humanities proffies predicted for the early '90s), I also went into the whole thing with a degree of caution, not quite sure where I'd fit, or that I'd yet met someone whose career trajectory I'd want to emulate, though I did know that, like them, I wanted to take the teaching part of the job seriously.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell after a bit of googling, the people who gave me their time and energy when I was an undergrad, and so helped me along the path to graduate school, are all still very actively dealing with today's students, both in the classroom and as the directors of programs and departments (which doesn't surprise me, given the civic-mindedness they shared). One has recently returned to the classroom after several decades as a Dean. It's hard to tell from pictures, but they generally look happy, and not shockingly aged by the experience or heartbroken or anything like that. It's also worth noting, as Cal's tale suggests, that teaching intro classes to freshmen who don't really want to be in said classes has never been an easy task, even if some of the ways in which it isn't easy change over time.
I have a picture of my undergraduate mentor up over my desk. He used to set up appointments to go over what I'd missed when I skipped a class. Thanks to his confidence that I could actually learn this stuff, I started coming to class again, and thirty years or so later, here I am teaching it. I met him for coffee whenever I went back home to visit the folks, and we would catch up on stuff; he was an invaluable source of advice and inspiration through my grad school days and throughout my career.
ReplyDeleteI thought he was immortal. It was an awful shock to me when one of my old students, now a grad student at his school, emailed me 2 years ago to tell me that he had died unexpectedly a couple of days before. I cried for three days. He'd only retired a couple of years before.
Could he deal with today's students? Sure. He never had any illusions about students, how interested they were, how much work they were likely to do, how much they were likely to try to get away with. He knew all about entitlement; he was an old private school alum himself and had been surrounded by those kids in his youth. He didn't let these things rattle him.
@Merely: I think you've hit on an important point: it's not just the students who have changed; it's also the proffies. We're much less likely, as a group, to be privileged in various ways, not only socioeconomic/educational background, but also gender, tenure status/eligibility, semester-to-semester job security, etc. And, at an institutional level, our opinions have lost weight and status, while the students' opinions have gained both. I suppose there will always be professors idealistic enough to have their hearts broken by students, but, given our generally diminished status, there are probably a growing number of us who could manage to be more unflappable -- and maintain higher standards -- if we had even a fraction of the institutionally-conferred authority that our predecessors did.
ReplyDeleteI will write nothing about myself, but I have to say it's damn good to hear from Froderick Frankenstien.* I never got too deep into Astronomy because of my poor maths, but the (self-imposed) backwardness of your undergrad instructors is appalling; photos only, no scanning equipment, screw that.
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* I hope that Bubbles the chimp survived orbit and returned safe and sound. I myself want to send newts to the Far Side of the Moon; perhaps they will mutate and learn to live in a vacuum, or at least grow into monstrosities that will eat the taikonauts when the Chinese deign to send them.
Mine was my freshman Intro to Shakespeare professor. We read ten plays that semester, including Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. It wasn't until I was a faculty member myself that I realized inflicting this particular lineup of texts on freshmen was completely fucking insane.
ReplyDeleteWhatever. I loved it. I think all Shakespeareans remake the Bard in our own image, and the Shakespeare he introduced us to was cynical and slyly subversive, a man who sided with the common soldiers against the kings, and who didn't believe a word of what he made Ulysses say about degree. I took his epic poetry class a year later, and that was fantastic as well, but it's Shakespeare that has stayed with me.
He was the first teacher I ever had who swore in class. He played a fierce devil's advocate, and adored slaying sacred cows and grinding them into hamburger. Students either loved or hated him. He was a notoriously tough grader, but also made it clear that he didn't believe in grades: as far as he was concerned, they were for the benefit of employers and bureaucrats, not students.
He was always five minutes late to class. He'd be out on the front porch of the English building, smoking and drinking his coffee, and he'd lose track of time. He generally came in rambling. We got to hear about Victorian illustrated editions of Shakespeare, and how they never had any pictures of Cressida; and about the freshman humanities requirement at his alma mater, thirty years earlier. Somehow an explanation of epic similes turned into a discussion of sheep's milk cheese. By way of explaining his lateness, one day, he asked, rhetorically, how you were supposed to get from The Scarlet Letter to The Odyssey in fifteen minutes. By the end of the class, I'd worked out an extended comparison between Odysseus and Chillingworth, and approached him, rather shyly, to offer it up. That was the day he told me I ought to think about grad school.
He'd been married and divorced five times. I suspect at least some of them were his former students. I came to his office after my boyfriend dumped me a week before Christmas senior year, leaving me with a stack of grad school applications and a half-bottle of cheap vodka for consolation. He told me it had been scientifically proven that heartbreak was good for the circulation, but I didn't need that at my age, and proceeded to flirt with me in the completely harmless way that you can only flirt with a girl more than thirty years your junior. Of course he shouldn't have done that. But it helped immensely, and I still treasure the memory. He also quoted Adrienne Rich when we were discussing the Iliad, and ran a classroom that was a far friendlier place for a young feminist than most of the women's studies classes I took.
He's still teaching, although he's been semi-retired for a few years and is, I think, technically contingent faculty. I'm glad he's still around. I suppose they don't let anyone smoke on the front porch any more. That makes me sad. I hope nobody told him to tone it down or come to class on time or watch what he said to the female students when he gave up tenure.