A teacher's legacy
Late last month I was able to spend time with a former student and her partner. She and I have stayed in touch rather irregularly over the thirty-five years since she was in my classes. I’ve followed her career as an attorney and now as a judge with interest and, I admit, more than a little pride. During our time together last month, she was kind enough to tell me that she sees me as a major influence in her intellectual development. “You helped me, as a rather young 17-year-old woman, to see that I was more intelligent than I thought I was.”
That, I think, is a good lesson to learn, and I suspect that she could have learned that in interactions with many other teachers. I’m honored to hear her say that she learned it with me. With that in mind, I was struck earlier today by something that Irving Kristol said in a 1972 Rockefeller Foundation sponsored discussion about “Values in Contemporary Society” (Hannah Arendt was another discussant; the transcript is reprinted in Thinking Without A Banister, a collection of essays and other pieces by Hannah Arendt, pp. 438ff).
One teacher can produce six serious thinkers, if he’s lucky, in a lifetime. That’s a lot. Five teachers can produce 30. One has to assume that this is for the good.
I think the student with whom I visited last month is one such serious thinker, and after our visit I found myself thinking of several other students on whom I had something of an impact. Some — maybe even most — of the ones I have in mind came into my classroom as serious thinkers, but they gave me reason to think that their work with me was important to their intellectual growth. Perhaps they learned something more about serious thinking in classes that I taught. I remember one such student who came to my office after receiving a lower grade than she would have liked on the first paper she submitted to me. Without my knowledge, she had enrolled in an upper level seminar that I would have discouraged her from taking so early in her college career. But she wasn’t there to complain about the grade. She was there with a simple question. I don’t remember the question exactly, but it was something like “Can you help me understand how I might write a better paper?” She went on to write much better papers than that first one. I remember another student in a Problem of God class at Georgetown. He came from a very conservative religious background, but was eager to engage with a wide variety of students and texts, both religious and secular. Three years later, as he planned his post-graduation summer, he emailed me to ask if I would recommend at least one book that he might read. And another student who, after doing well in multiple philosophy classes, took an independent studies course on Whitehead’s philosophy — an ambitious project for an undergraduate. She was kind enough to mention her work with me in the acknowledgments of a dissertation she wrote several years later.
I’m not sure that I was lucky enough to have “produced” half a dozen serious thinkers. (I should say that I think that’s a rather odd verb to use here. It brings to mind Arendt’s distinction between work and action, and has me thinking that Arendt’s notion of a realm of appearance in human beings act with one another could be a good way of thinking about the exchanges among students and teacher in a classroom. That’s a matter for another post.) Still, Kristol’s comment together with my former student’s comment has me thinking about the legacy that one leaves after a career in the classroom. I have to agree with Kristol: doing whatever one can do to cultivate serious thinking is definitely “for the good.” In times like these, we are especially desperate for such goodness and for teachers who inspire it.
Arendt concludes the discussion, encouraging the Foundation to “do something to raise the prestige, not of the so-called charismatic teacher who is usually a disaster, but of teachers who are truly dedicated. There are not so very many. This is a gift that is very rare, a gift of a very high caliber.” (I would point out that she must have had her husband, Heinrich Blücher, in mind here.)
I’m not bold enough to claim to be such a rare gift. In fact, I’m more inclined to believe that thoughtful students like the ones I describe above brought their gifts to me. In the ideal case, students and teachers work together to create opportunities for growth.
