The cleaving in Dickinson's mind, and the role of a teacher
I wrote earlier this week about the cleaving in Emily Dickenson’s mind and followed that up with a rant about my frustration with end notes. For some reason, as I was thinking about both of those posts this morning I quite suddenly remembered a brief conversation I had with my favorite philosophy teacher. Joe (the philosophy professor) was one of the most intelligent people I ever spent time with. Moreover, He read more broadly and more deeply than any other person I’ve known.
I remember chatting with him in the hallway one day when a young English instructor finishing his dissertation on a poet whose name I don’t remember approached us. Actually, I should say that he approached Joe. He really didn’t want or need anything from me. He asked Joe if he happened to have a rather obscure book about the poet he was writing about. Joe said that he’d read the book, but didn’t own a copy; he asked the instructor what he was hoping to find in that book. The instructor described what he was working on, and Joe said something like “Oh, you really don’t need that book, but I can loan you two other books that I think would be very helpful.”
I described that conversation only to illustrate the depth and breadth of Joe’s reading. The conversation that came to mind this morning was one in which I ranted about endnotes vs footnotes. I was, shall we say, rather more passionate when I was talking to Joe than I was in the blog post earlier this week. Joe was rather calm and said that he really didn’t have a problem with that. “I just read all of the end notes before I start reading the book itself.” I was stunned. Recalling Dickinson’s poem, I’m thinking that he really didn’t have much trouble keeping thoughts joined together, even when these thoughts were separated by both space and time. Did he really remember a note he’d read days before when he encountered the reference in the actual text?
That’s a good illustration of Joe’s mind. He was a thinker in the strongest sense of that term. He was also an excellent teacher. What I remember best about his teaching is how he responded to student questions. I said something about this in my earlier post about him; I’ll say a bit more now. In my last semester as an undergraduate, I sat in on his introductory history of philosophy class. I wanted to get a better sense of the historical development of philosophy, and I also wanted to observe him as a teacher. Most of the students in the class were first-year students who knew next to nothing about philosophy. It wasn’t at all unusual — in fact it was rather common – for a student to ask a question in class that led me to think that the student had no clear idea of what the question was, let alone any sense for what might be an answer to it. Time and time again, Joe would reframe the question in a way that not only grounded it in the text we were reading but also — and this is what amazed me — helped the student see that this really was the question he or she was attempting to ask.
The power in this went beyond clarifying questions. Joe was modeling the practice of a thinker rather than merely reciting in lecture the results of his earlier thinking. I think he’s one reason I eventually came to the metaphor that teaching is thinking in public. Thinking of Dickenson’s poem again, Joe was able not only to keep his own thoughts together. He was also skilled at helping students, both novice and advanced, find connections between their reading and their thoughts. I studied under some very good teachers and thinkers in college and graduate school, and in my career I worked with very good professors at good universities as they worked to improve their teaching practice. I never saw anyone respond to students as well as Joe did.
