Anti-Climacus

In the last week I've been thinking a bit about the relationship between teaching and reading, prompted by this article by Alan Jacobs that made the rounds. Its immediate thrill was this line, destined, as it is, for long-running gchat status:

("I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing," Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. "Can I go back to my books now?")

The article does raise and not really answer the question of what one is supposed to do when one's job is to teach students how to read long and complicated books carefully. The writing analogue to this problem is well-understood and usually addressed in the curriculum of a college: very bright, capable students can (and do) come in as freshmen with atrocious writing skills. In order to produce marginal improvement, they need a seminar in which their writing is broken down and then rebuilt in a form acceptable for research papers in the humanities and social sciences. The results of this process are mixed, as anyone can attest who has had to give a C to a senior's paper, riddled as it is with grammatical and spelling errors to match the problems with content. But at least it's recognized as a problem.

I talk about reading for political theory in my 'teaching statement,' and the problems that it causes when students cannot read at the proper level. Often students appear to assume that reading is the skill they picked up in early childhood and there's nothing more to it than applying that skill to whatever's put in front of them. Then the class spends 30 minutes on a sentence from, say, Aristotle, and it might begin to occur to them that a lot is going on in what they are assigned to read that they might otherwise be missing. But even if they realize it, it's still hard to make them care.

For many pedagogical purposes, I assume my former self to be something like a modal student: in college, I was interested and capable of doing well (hence grad school), but had a low tolerance for busywork or anything the professor indicated was not strictly necessary. Usually this approach sets me on a good path: don't assign too many books, don't do groupwork, don't give assignments whose purposes are disciplinary rather than evaluative. But my experience is useless on this question: my own path was one of auto-didacticism from high school on. A teacher or professor can assign the text, but it only begins to matter to me once I've had some time to spend with it on my own, or it becomes a part of my own interests and thus something I develop myself (this is why I have in-depth knowledge of post-World War I British autobiographies--it was very interesting to me in 2001).

How this is all to resolve itself, I have no idea. Ask me again in a month or two.