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IN THE early years of my career as a graduate adviser, when my students confessed nervousness at the prospect of teaching their first classes, I would say, “Just go in there and be yourself.” At a certain point, however, I realized that this advice was incorrect. You don't have a “self” to be when you start out as a teacher; that is, you don't have a teacher-self. You have to develop one, and you do that by acting a part, by performing a role tailored to the needs of the classroom, by responding to the classroom as you would to a theater. In other words, what I would now tell a student starting out to be a teacher is not “Be yourself” but “Make your self”; that is, make yourself a teacher by a process of role mastery. (What I actually tell students who ask for advice about teaching is something different, but I return to that a bit later.)
Now I don't mean by this formulation that there is no continuity between the self of one's student or personal life and the self of the classroom; of course one has to work with one's total resources and personality. Nor am I suggesting that to be a teacher you must put on an act in the popular sense of the term, that is, become a phony. What I mean about developing a teacher-self by mastering a role to be played in the classroom-theater, I can perhaps best explain with reference to two of my favorite books: Richard Lanham's Motives of Eloquence and Michael Goldman's Actor's Freedom.
Lanham distinguishes between two conceptions of the self, the “serious” self and the “rhetorical” self. The former, which he traces back to Plato's philosophical doctrines, proposes the existence of a single, constant core of selfhood, obscured by social or professional routines but always and consistently there nonetheless. Such a view of the self underlies the ideals of sincerity and naturalness as desiderata of human interaction—the idea that you can get at a single “real you” by peeling off layers of disguise. In telling my students to be themselves in the classroom I was invoking this concept.
The concept of the rhetorical self, in contrast, denies the possibility of a single, natural self. We take on the persona, the role, the identity that a situation requires of us if we are to control it for our needs and purposes. Now, with respect to teaching, evidence for the appositeness of the concept of the rhetorical self resides in the frequently observed fact that a person who may be shy, introverted, uninteresting outside the classroom is metamorphosed into an exciting, gripping personality once in it. The classroom is a special situation, not continuous with the “outside world,” requiring a response—a persona, a self—not continuous with the other selves within us, formed by our responses to other situations.
Regarding the classroom situation, insofar as it concerns the formation of a performing teacher-self, Goldman gives us useful information in his analysis of the theatrical situation. He defines the theatrical occasion as a transaction between actor and audience; in this transaction the actor has a privileged position from which to exert a claim on our attention, our emotions, our perceptions. In performing, the actor embodies a terrific force (Goldman chooses the adjective for its semantic overtones of terror) to use against us as a special, licensed kind of aggression. In actions, words, and presence, the actor has the status of “the other” vis-àvis the audience. Yet, simultaneously, the performer's task in the drama is the acting out and the working out of things for that audience—things that we cannot normally face or articulate but that are there, nonetheless, in our fears and fantasies, our anxieties and aspirations. In other words, the actor is also our surrogate. There is clearly a paradox here: the actor has authority, exemption from mortality, a charmed life—at least while the play lasts—yet also terrible vulnerability to our approval or disapproval. The actor is our master but also our victim.
Above all, the actor succeeds by responding to a role with intensity and by communicating that intensity to the audience, so that we cannot remain unaffected, unmoved, uninvolved. The actor's job, finally, is to pull the audience into the world created by the performance-by bodily movements and words, by physical, mental, and emotional exertion.
It seems to me that in several ways the classroom situation resembles the theatrical one described by Goldman:
1. The center of the class is a transaction between the teacher and the students, not just a transfer of information. A great teacher isn't just one who knows a lot, or who has attractive values, or who deals with students humanely. A great teacher qua teacher—as opposed to scholar or ethical exemplar or authority figure—has intensity and communicates it. That intensity is related directly to the confrontatory aspect of the classroom. It's rooted in our basic adrenal response to entering a classroom—to putting ourselves on the line before other selves as tenuous as our own—to performing. Our response to the classroom is, first of all, fear, a form of stage fright that, far from being shameful, is crucially important. The energies it stimulates enable us to overcome the impulse to flight and thus to meet the challenge that awaits us. In fact, entering the classroom should always be something of a struggle—we should always be aware of the symbolic importance of stepping over the threshold. However much experience we have, entering a classroom should be seen as a challenge accepted, as a kind of heroic act—never as a neutral event.
A great class, then, isn't one in which you, as the instructor, communicate facts—though that happens, of course—but one in which you sense and meet a challenge, forming a community of risk around and by the intensity of your presence. Your job, in other words, is to create a presence analogous to that of the successful actor, a presence by which you are at once completely in control, completely the aggressor, yet always potentially open to attack and therefore threatened, vulnerable, available to the students, inviting them to become involved, not cowed. You are at once completely other than they, yet also a version of them, a model to them, in that like them you constantly experience and communicate the experiences of challenge, challenge met, growth, and discovery.
This last point shows how the classroom finally differs from the theater—and it's as important to see the differences as it is the similarities. The classroom is indeed a theater of the self, but what makes it unique is that it's a theater of both your self and your students' selves. Hence your aim in creating a teacher-self should be to maximize self-fulfillment both for yourself and for your students. You have to see the two goals as linked if you are to meet the challenge of the classroom, which means finding a mode of behavior, forging and perfecting a role as teacher, that exploits the potential of all the selves in the room. Your classroom performance must avoid both the Scylla of self-effacement (which impedes fulfillment for you) and the Charybdis of repressing or manipulating your students (which denies fulfillment to them). Instead, it should constantly enact and reenact your basic choice of this profession because of its potential to satisfy your needs and those of your students. Those needs, whatever they may be, are not simply the communication and reception of facts; if they were, machines could replace both teachers and students in the classroom.
There is a famous story about a professor at a major university whose career had prospered to the point that he was in demand for speaking engagements around the world. To meet his commitments, he fell into the practice of missing several of his undergraduate lectures each term and sending his research assistant to class with a cassette recorder containing a taped version of the lecture. On one occasion, a planned out-of-town trip was canceled at the last minute, and the illustrious professor decided to drop in unannounced on his class, to see if the students, who numbered in the hundreds, were taking notes assiduously on his authoritative pronouncements. Arriving at the classroom shortly after the beginning of the hour, he quietly opened the door to the lecture hall—and found at each desk, not a student, but a tape recorder set to record the taped lecture emanating from the empty podium. There was no other living creature in the room.
This story can serve as a paradigm of education that ignores the needs to which the classroom should cater: the needs of students and teachers to respond to one another, thereby to grow as individuals, to gain conscious control over—and thus to direct, channel, and maximize—their entire intellectual and, in the process, their emotional development. The classroom is a theater, and the piece to be acted is nothing less than the growth of the person. The classroom, at its best, should present a controlled, conscious, willed encapsulation and paradigm of the process of growth that, as John Henry Newman once said, is the only true sign of life.
So much for the theory. Practically, how do you go about mastering the role of teacher so that it becomes your classroom self, establishes the intense community that prompts risk-taking, consequent growth, and self-fulfillment for you and your students? First, of course, before you can interpret the part, you have to learn the lines. This, obviously, means preparing your class. All I want to say on this point is that, unlike a play script, your “script” has two registers, or levels: the actual text or material you are dealing with on a given day and the whole of your professional training and indeed of your life experience, which provides a matrix for your particular preparation of a text. You possess both these levels inevitably, but what you do with them, how you exploit them, falls under the head of role playing. You should never take your knowledge for granted, just letting it come up, or, worse, decide that any part of it is irrelevant to what you're teaching. Plan to use it dramatically. The unexpected, even outlandish parallel between a text and something that happened to you as a child or something in an old movie or something you've observed at cocktail parties is a valuable pedagogical weapon, provided that you believe in its relevance and truth. To use such material, to change registers unexpectedly from the specific text to the general level of your knowledge and observation, is like the sudden, dramatic opening of a perspective vista on a baroque stage—it focuses attention and prompts intellectual or imaginative breakthroughs.
Once you've learned your lines, you must form your interpretation of the character of the teacher. This process can perhaps best be understood as learning how to articulate and integrate two sides of the teaching self that exist in paradox and tension: authority and vulnerability. You must constantly work on both, but at the beginning of your career, at least, when you are inclined to feel pretty vulnerable anyway, it's best to concentrate on developing the authority side. And here is where I tell you what advice I really give to my students when they begin teaching—Hanning's first law of pedagogy, if you will: The little bastards are always wrong. Translated from its hyperbolic mode, this statement simply means that you must take confidence into the classroom with you. You must decide by an act of will, however illogical or indefensible the decision may seem intellectually, that you are right in what you are doing, that you needn't feel threatened by your students. You know more than they do, you have thought about teaching as they have not thought about learning; your development is far ahead of theirs. Only on the basis of such absolute, willed confidence can you begin to allow yourself to be vulnerable, can you show pity or sympathy for your students—can you help them, in short. Without confidence, no authority; without authority, no effective classroom. Can actors afford to lack confidence in themselves? Can they defer to, crumble before, an audience? Not at all.
Of course, the playing out of the authority role (and consequently, by dint of practice, the genuine possession of it, in a manner analogous to the possession of virtue in Aristotle's Ethics ) has its real dangers, to which I have earlier referred, namely, the repression and manipulation of your students. If you try to be a tough guy in class—and I'm not referring to a particular sex—you will stop the communication process dead in its tracks. More subtly dangerous is the manipulation that makes students mere objects of your self-gratification, sacrificial offerings on the altar of your ego. In universities across the land, teachers are constantly playing out the myths of Pygmalion and Narcissus. Pygmalion made a statue and fell in love with his own artwork. If you try to make students too much in your own image, you relive this myth. You must avoid with all your might training students to give the one answer you want, to see things only your way. A possible danger sign is the extent to which you find yourself playing the “I am thinking of a word” game, as practiced by one of the most distinguished teachers I studied with as an undergraduate. Dangling his glasses in one hand, he would look sagely, and a trifle skeptically, at us and ask us to say the particular word he was thinking of that he had come to feel perfectly described a particular poem's effect or a poet's intent. Such a game, I can assure you, makes the students feel like trained seals, and stupid ones at that (since only rarely did we arrive at the precise word sought by the master), and gives the instructor a permanent sense of superiority as the only person who knows the secret critical talisman.
You can fall into the Narcissus myth by adhering to Pygmalion's; that is, you can come to the point where what gives you the greatest pleasure as a teacher is looking out into the classroom—or reading term papers—and finding a class full of little “yous,” little imitations of yourself, not independent selves in the process of developing under your guidance. Such teaching sacrifices the self-fulfillment of the students and stunts their growth, keeps them children intellectually and emotionally. At the first MLA convention I ever attended, I recall meeting a man much older than myself, the holder of a Columbia Ph.D., who was then teaching on the West Coast. He was terribly eager to speak to me, and the reason was most curious, as it emerged over coffee: he had studied some years before with a distinguished scholar at Columbia who was famous for turning out students whose critical perspectives and voices mimicked his own, often pathetically. Now at work on a second book, my informant had arrived at an argument that ran counter to the announced views of his former mentor, and he was tortured by the question of whether he dared communicate this difference of views to the Great Man. He was a complete victim, I would say, of overauthoritarian, Pygmalion-Narcissus pedagogy. But even more deleterious than its effect on students is the effect of such a strategy on you, the teacher, because it stunts your growth by preventing situations in your classroom that challenge you to grow into new dimensions of your role. The Pygmalion-Narcissus syndrome is the mark of a stale actor.
As for developing the vulnerability side of your teacher-self, here your ignorance is crucial. Ignorance is a burden we all live with, or should—if you think you know enough you shouldn't be either a student or a teacher—but to use ignorance creatively in teaching is perhaps our greatest challenge. Through your ignorances you can best make contact with your students and open yourself to them in their ignorance. The basis of this side of your teaching self is, frankly, love. I don't mean this in any sentimental or mawkish way. I simply mean that if we are lured across the threshold of the classroom by the desire to meet the challenge of fear, to conquer it, to exert our authority over our own intellectual growth, we are also lured by a feeling of solidarity with others, with the students across the threshold, who need us in order to learn and to grow up, and with the great teachers of our own past, whom we loved and want to emulate. Our recollection of our own great teachers, coupled with our sense of paying a debt to them, is an interesting resource of our memory that can and should be exploited in forming ourselves as teachers, especially in inviting students onward by opening ourselves to them, as our own great teachers invited us.
The danger in cultivating vulnerability is primarily that of self-effacement. This takes two forms. The more obvious is the refusal to be in charge in a classroom—the refusal to set standards, the desire to be more like a peer and a friend to your students than a guide and an authority. I'm not saying that the instincts of friendship are wrong, but I am saying that they must be kept in a firm context of the fact and necessity of your leadership. And you must also recognize the extent to which differences in age, experience, and knowledge render a peer friendship between student and teacher difficult, if not impossible. To try to overcome these realities by seeking to prolong your own youth is a mistake of potentially tragic personal proportions, as many teachers have discovered too late. In fact, such self-effacement, when it does not win the desired student acceptance, can lead to hurt and a desire for vengeance. This dark side of teaching is perhaps best not spoken of, but it does provide a warning about the necessity of putting a limit on your vulnerability.
The second, more intellectual kind of self-effacement involves hiding behind critical language or jargon, so that the student can't in fact make direct contact with your mind. This is especially dangerous with beginning college students, who are naive enough to be led terribly astray if their classroom transactions are with you playing the role, not of yourself, but of Northrop Frye or Derrida. When I was a graduate student and a resident counselor in an undergraduate dormitory, I was approached one evening by a freshman who had a question about a classical text he had been assigned to read for Columbia College's great-books humanities course. Instead of opening himself to all the myriad possibilities of the text and what it had to say to him about life, war, the relations between sexes and generations, and the like, he was obsessed by trying to decide whether the text conformed to the high or low mimetic mode—he was trying, in short, to apply as a kind of skeleton key some ill-understood critical terminology his teacher had passed on to him in class at the very beginning of the term. The teacher in question had committed a serious error of intellectual self-effacement, and the student was suffering accordingly.
I would argue, then, that the key to the forming and performing of the teacher-self in the classroom lies in working hard and consciously at both sides of the paradoxical relation between authority and vulnerability in your persona. Toward this end, I can offer a few practical comments and suggestions, but each of you will have to work out your own classroom routines and self-cultivation. Routines are important—large and small ones, patterns of behavior and bits of business.
Altogether, the effect of the paradoxical mixing of authority and vulnerability in the classroom is that you open a gap between yourself and the students while simultaneously inviting them to close it. You encourage them to think that they can grow up, even while you make it clear that there is plenty of growing up to do if they are to attain your level of authority and control. The best teachers I had in college were those who made me believe completely that I could never be so intelligent or so informed as they were but who nonetheless encouraged me to try.
Teaching never becomes automatic. It must constantly encourage growth in you and in your students. Mark Van Doren once said that teachers belong to the only profession paid to tell the truth. I can agree with that sentiment, but I would add that telling the truth is not enough for a teacher who wishes to be effective, to be a “good teacher,” that highest of all accolades for us. The secret of being a good teacher lies in acting out each day in your classroom the basic truth of life, which is the growth of the self, the drive toward self-mastery and self-fulfillment.
The author is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Goldman, Michael. The Actor's Freedom. New York: Viking, 1975.
Lanham, Richard. The Motives of Eloquence. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976.
© 1984 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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