TITLE: Teach, That's My Advice
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 10, 2019 2:04 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
In Tyler Cowen's
conversation with poet Elisa New,
he asks closes with one of his standard questions:
COWEN: Last question. You meet an 18-year-old, and this person wants
in some way to be a future version of you, Elisa New, and asks you for
advice. What advice do you give them?
NEW: Teach.
COWEN: Teach.
NEW: Yes, teach the young, and yes, that's the advice. Because
what teaching is, is learning to converse with others. It's to
experience a topic as it grows richer and richer under the
attentions of a community. That's what a classroom that really
works is. It's a community that's ever rewarding.
New's justification for teaching has two parts. The first struck
me as central to the task of becoming a poet, or a writer of any
sort: learning to converse -- to express and exchange ideas --
with others. To converse is to use words and to experience their
effects, both as speaker and listener. Over my years in the
classroom, I've come to appreciate this benefit of teaching.
It's made me a better teacher and, if not a better writer, at
least a writer more aware of the different ways in which I can
express my ideas.
New's second justification captures well the central value of
teaching to an academic. To teach is to experience a topic as
it grows richer under the attention of a community. What a
wonderful phrase!
Some people think that teaching will steal time from their work
as a literary scholar, historian, or scientist. But teaching
helps us to see deeper into our discipline by urging us to
examine it over and over from new vantage points. Every new
semester and every new student creates a new conversation for
me, and these conversations remind me that there is even more
to a topic than I think -- more often than I ever thought they
would before I became a professor. Just when I think I've
mastered something, working with students seems most likely to
help me see something new, in a way different than I might see
something new through my own study.
This exposes one of the advantages of working in a graduate
program or in an ongoing research lab: building a community that
has some continuity over time. Teaching at an undergraduate
institution means that not as many of my students will be able
to work with me and one another on the same topic over time.
Even so, follow-up courses and undergrad research projects do
allow us to create overlapping communities with a lifespan
longer than a single semester. It simply requires a different
mindset than working in a big research lab.
So I heartily echo Professor New: teach, that's my advice.
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