Laughing and Learning

The guts of teaching are how we feel about our students. If we can teach for their sakes, as well as for the sake of our own intellectual journey, then our profession can become what it should be: generous, life-enhancing, perenially satisfying.

Unfortunately, we know that good will towards students and earnest attention to teaching are not ubiquitous. We all know teachers who don't value students, who in some sense don't even see their students. We don't know how many there are--we hope they are few--but we know what they are like as a type. They think of it as something that they do on their own, not as something that involves others. It's a performance they give, their traveling show; they could give it anywhere, to anyone. They may respect "teaching," because it is something they know they're good at, but they've forgotten learning, which is what those others do, often quite slowly and defectively. It's not ignorance that bothers them: ignorance exists like a hole in the desert, for them to pour their learning into; it's "incompetence"--students not picking it all up rapidly, but getting muddled and not being able to unwrap their own muddles. The hidden fact about our profession--perhaps not too well hidden--is that learners complete it enormously. Teachers want to get on with their own work, and their genuine involvement gets reinforced by ambition, egotism, and institutional pressures to produce. They're frustrated by the existence of learners, and this makes them behave, sometimes, in hostile ways.

"Teachers are thrown into the classroom without any preparation for teaching"--this is one of the complaints voiced by well-meaning college teachers all over the country--but I have to say that we don't come in totally unprepared. By the time we step into our first classroom, we have been prepped for students: we have heard--and possibly rehearsed--snappy comebacks, defensive reports, haughty tones, nasty laughs. I once heard some of my friends in graduate school chuckling over the best answer to give any student who asked a question one couldn't answer; the best answer, according to one of them, was "We don't know that yet." The "we," of course, were the collective Masters of Knowledge; it didn't include the students. From kindergarten on, we've absorbed the idea that the educational process is a hierarchy, and when it's our turn to move toward the top, some of us unthinkingly begin to reproduce that hierarchy.

Most, I believe, reject the snappy comeback, defensiveness, haughtiness, and nasty laughter, from the outset of our teaching careers. I imagine that many people go into the profession, which they know it or not, because someone filled the classroom for them with affectionate attention. When the look I give a student conveys a particularly challenging attitude of good expectation, some of that attitude comes straight from my fourth-grade teacher, Florence Sayer. The student I'm looking at sees a look that was directed at me in 1951, and that had been in use in dingy green classrooms as early as 1933. There was some toughness in that look--there was more toughness in that era--but I saw in it a prophecy that welcome words were about to come out of my mouth. The tradition of our profession are not all in texts from Plato and Rousseau and Dewey; many of the most important are intangible and unrecorded. The codeword these days is "eye contact," but this cold phrase doesn't capture the intensity and pride which many of us remember from our earliest encounters with learning.

I'll go farther--probably many wonderful leaders of discussion classes today look at students with the steady attention and approval that their parents gave to them when they were learning to walk. According to the English developmental theorist, D.W. Winnicott, the parent kneeling on the floor a few feet from the toddler is creating a "space" in which learning takes place, in which there is little danger, much intrinsic reward, and the right amount (not too much) of excitement and applause and laughter. There are many kinds of laughter connected with learning, and the prophetic, promissory laugh drives out the mean, defeatist laugh.

What does the parent kneeling on the floor have to do with pedagogical improvement at the college level? At our most ambitious, those of us involved with the improvement of teachers think we can show teachers, very subtly, how to create environments in which more learning takes place, with more pleasure for everyone concerned. Anyone teaching at the college level is very likely to have been on the receiving end of many loving, approving, educationally productive looks. Our project is to encourage that child to become the adult who gives them. And that usually requires a revolution in consciousness. We all know that the revolution doesn't occur simply because a person does the work necessary to get an advanced degree in a special subject. Your doctoral robe gets you into a classroom filled with curious faces, but won't make you feel like a teacher' it may only make you feel like a Macheth in stolen robes that hang loose upon him. Any book or program that purports to help teachers has to help the "usurper" grow into the robes.

The first step in this revolution of consciousness is for all of us to learn to deprecate the old bad ways. We have to overcome whatever residue of the adversarial and the estranged clings to our attitude toward students. Too many teachers continue throughout their careers to dread their students and thus their classes. This dread has something to do with the fear of not knowing "enough." Everyone--starting with the teacher--has to feel free to say, "I don't know, but I can find out." Joseph S. Nye, professor of Government, who appeared in one of the Harvard-Danforth Center's many panel discussions on teaching, recommended telling students, "You're bound to stump me if you're any good." That formula elevates everyone high enough so that a little ignorance doesn't drop anyone out of heaven. Losing the fear of annihilation is worth a lot. Most of us will readily give up for it certain poses and tones, certain archaic signs of authority about which we were in any case deeply ambivalent.

"The most important principle of successful teaching is to have a deep respect for students," said Otto Eckstein, professor of Economics, at another panel discussion. Some teachers might have a problem with "respect"--something a student, or anybody else, needs to earn. But good expectation is an attitude we can bring forward in advance of evidence, or even (remembering the second prophecy) in contradiction to evidence. It approximates respect; it produces the same effects.

Our obligation, in short, is to value students enough to value everything we do for them. I include here not only sincere listening but also writing recommendations and explaining how the introductory sentences of their first papers can be made interesting. It means stopping yourself in a feverish class discussion even though you know you could make the best contribution of all. What advances us into this degree of selflessness? We come to it gradually, by accepting the duties that come with appropriating the right models. "Being a teacher means assuming responsibility for someone's life, at a certain level," said Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky, soon to return to teaching, at a Harvard-Danforth Center Orientation and Welcome. "It's a very, very serious business."

Revolutions in consciousness are probably best made indirectly. The programs of the Harvard-Danforth Center are in the enviable and powerful position of taking for granted these assumptions--about control and responsibility and effectiveness. You have to understand the persuasive power of not needing to assert that something matters. It's part of the subtle power of Professor Christensen's case method. He likes to quote the Quaker saying, "God is in the details." If in the details, then in the whole enterprise. The stakes are high in every case he uses, and the teachers in his class are waving their arms to get air time.

That's what the education of the teacher is all about. It's not presumptuous to compare what we do to building the Temple; the danger is quite the opposite, to trivialize it, because it may look merely like a set of jobs--mixing mortar, carrying hods. You have to have a vision in your head of what the building will finally look like.

As we all know, starting around 1970, the academic establishment has suffered a crisis of confidence. When the growth stopped, many other things went wrong. We lost some of our best and most dedicated teachers--there wasn't room for them. The culture stopped supporting education: it lost the trusting, confiding attitude towards the educational endeavor that had made that endeavor great and successful for generations. But despite all these factors, those who stayed in teaching during this period, or who were able to start--if they fought successfully against becoming demoralized--have continued to lead privileged lives in the classroom. There, while the content changes, the age-old structure of relationships changes little--or, as I have suggested, it improves, based on better models. The intrinsic rewards never change. The process (including such details as papers and exams) that enables teachers and students to see the foundations of the Temple laid--this still goes on. Moreover, in this same period, interest in teaching has amazed us by becoming a larger part of our discourse within the profession. Institutions are weighing teaching more heavily in tenure decisions, and students as consumers are demanding better instruction.

But these factors can't explain the spirit in which teachers use the programs of existing centers like Harvard's, or the spirit in which they spontaneously decide that they want to meet together to invent their own programs. As educators meeting together, we show that we continue to have confidence in our values and processes and products. We survive crisis and coercion, the external evils, by creating these new communities. And the conversation within a community of teachers defeats our internal, occupational evils, hierarchy and solipsism. It gives us occasions to share our special laugh.

Margaret M. Gullette is the Assistant Director of the Harvard-Danforth Center.