I can’t think of anything more rewarding than teaching. Or more challenging.
Let me introduce myself: I’m a professor at Amherst College, although I don’t like the word “professor,” because it is too pompous. I also don’t like the word “academic.” It makes me feel isolated, detached.
I prefer to be called a teacher. I didn’t set out to become one. In some ways, I became a teacher out of necessity. I’m an immigrant from Mexico. I needed a visa. Teaching seemed like a worthy route to getting one.
I teach literature. I love books. My mission is to make students love them as well. I open them in front of their eyes. Not just any book, but what I call “tested books” by writers of all backgrounds — Plato, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Dostoyevsky, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Gabriel García Marquez — that have survived the passing of time. In other words, the classics.
It is no surprise that the classics are under siege now. They are seen as biased, dubious and suspect. I tell students that classics are books we don’t only read but reread. That is, they have to survive scrutiny, which is no easy feat.
As I see it, there is nothing wrong with rejecting the classics. The transmission of knowledge shouldn’t be mechanical. Each of us needs to discover a classic afresh because the classics were not written for abstract readers. They were written specifically for us. If we don’t like them, we should read other classics.
Ours is an age of intolerance that really doesn’t value books. Washington is the land of distrust. The nation is commanded by a Latin America-styled tyrant who not only doesn’t read (the book he wrote was concocted by someone else) but whose lexicon seems to consist of 750 words. Much of the rest of the country sees difference as a threat.
In our own community, the disease of intolerance is present. Before the presidential election, racist and anti-Semitic graffiti appeared on Mount Tom. Likewise, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, sexist and misogynistic incidents have been reported in our public schools.
Of course, prejudice doesn’t live outside campuses only. Liberals, who fashion themselves as free of bigotry, can be just as chauvinistic. Opposing views that are considered unwelcome are shut down. Students of the current generation — the cool, distracted millennials — are imbued with preconceived ideas that are equally narrow-minded.
The whole brew is toxic. Truth is frowned upon. Nothing matters because nothing lasts. All of which makes teaching more important than ever.
The classroom cannot be divorced from the real world, even when that world is in a state of disarray, as is ours. Each classroom must be a testing ground where ideas are pondered thoroughly. It must also be the place where we slow down. In the classroom, we must take stock. Yes, there ought to be debates, but it is useless if those debates are screaming matches or based on dismissive attitudes. The classroom must lead by example.
Not long ago, I had a Latino student at Amherst College who looked down at anything a white person said because, she said angrily, it was “biased with privilege.” Her position was understandable. She came from a neighborhood in Los Angeles where interaction with non-Latinos was minimal. Montaigne once said that “we call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.” It was only after the class engaged with other kinds of difference that the student felt more at home.
To me, the classroom is where we fine-tune our better selves. It is where we discover what we don’t know and where we question everything. Doubt rules in the classroom because doubt is the door to knowledge. And knowledge must be won.
Words uttered in the classroom must be made to matter; they must be listened to fully and patiently, not only for what they mean but for how they sound: their music, their rhythm. Likewise, the classroom is where silence must be given its due. I love the sound a student makes before words come out and when thought is still being processed. There is a hiatus, a pause. That pause is the seed of wisdom.
And what about the teacher? In my view, the teacher is a companion like Virgil in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” An authority, yes, but not authoritarian. And certainly not a know-it-all.
Teaching is what anchors me. Next year it will be 25 years since I started doing it. I wouldn’t give up a single minute of it. But it goes without saying that teaching today is a battered and embittered career. Teachers are blamed for all sorts of ailments: reading failure, low test scores, poor academic performance. The result is that teaching isn’t often an attractive option for our undergraduates.
Yet teaching, I say this with absolute certainty, is an essential endeavor. It is about honoring who we are. The classroom is where intellectual curiosity is at home, where our cultural values are shaped. It is where people think, individually as well as in group. For that reason, it is crucial that we again make teaching the revered, humble vocation it used to be.
As our nation goes through this rough, ugly period, hopefully one that will pass soon, the classroom must be where humanity starts.
