[From LIBERAL EDUCATION, Fall 2002]

What I Teach and What I Teach For

by Robert H. Bell

     Thirty years ago, I was a twenty-six-year-old assistant professor, teaching Macbeth to about thirty students. Like all beginning teachers, afraid that some student might raise his hand and ask, "What does that mean?" I had massively overprepared by rereading Macbeth a dozen times. Amid an animated discussion of Shakespeare's use of the supernatural, Jennie in the first row raised her hand. "Why," she asked, "in Macbeth's vision, is the apparition carrying a glass?"

I was terrifically relieved because I had a great answer to this question. "Oh, that glass is a very important symbol in the play, Jennie. You see, Banquo carries a glass, or what we would call an hourglass, to represent time. And of course time is a central theme in the play because Macbeth is the enemy of time and all the natural order, as he eventually discovers in his great speech, 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace . . .'"

Jennie listened to my analysis and replied, "Uh, professor, my footnote says that glass means a mirror. Not an hourglass, a mirror."

For a brief moment, considering the embarrassing circumstances, I was pleased with my poised response.

"Really? Well, Jennie ... I guess that shows you can't believe everything you read."

"Yeah," said Jennie. "Or hear."

To Jennie, and all the wonderful Williams students who don't believe everything they read or hear, I dedicate these remarks.

I loved being a young teacher. What I lacked in experience, dignity and wisdom I made up in energy and bravado. Usually my momentum carried me--even rescued me from a few crash-and-burn situations. Now, thirty years later is an apt time to reflect upon my essential, passionate convictions about literature, and to articulate what I teach and what I teach for.

The Lens of Language

Introductory English still seems to me at the heart of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum. We study language and its implications, ways to explore, characterize, analyze, and appreciate the uses of language in various forms of literary expression or imaginative discourse. In the beginning is the word. In English 101 I am always asking, what does this word mean or suggest? Why is this particular word significant? How is this verbal construction organized? What are the effects of this specific choice or larger strategy? How does the narrative get from A to B to C? What does it encourage you to believe and feel? My methods are extremely particular—like Ramona’s cat, Picky-Picky.

Class discussions focus on specific details, including individual words, even sounds. We are always wondering, how does this word work and play? Our lens is even more microscopic or nanoscopic: A single word might become a big point and require a chunk of class time. Such techniques are best practiced in short, concentrated works such as a lyric poem or a Shakespearean soliloquy. Though I sometimes move tentatively from the micro to the macro, the larger ramifications in English 101 are rarely philosophic abstractions or political policies or historical trends. Language is the be-all and the end-all, word without end.

A central belief here is that good reading is close reading, or reading in slow motion. A corollary is that good reading and good writing are intimately connected. So my English 101 courses, light on reading assignments, are heavy on writing. Ideally, I would assign a short paper every class. In practice, with classes of twenty students, I require six or eight essays a term. The student’s essays address sharply focused problems. Just as every word counts mightily in a poem or a Shakespearean soliloquy, every word matters in a student’s paper. I read each paper carefully, making marginal comments and providing a detailed overall critique, explaining what was successful and unsuccessful, what might have been pursued or elaborated, what was neglected or misperceived. Reading student writing is the most demanding and perhaps the most important aspect of teaching English.

While nearly all Williams students could learn to write clear sentences and paragraphs, above all they need to learn better how to fashion a comprehensive, compelling argument. A paper is a rhetorical performance—rhetorical in the older, honorable sense of observing the means of persuasion. I urge the students not to be content expounding the obvious but to conceive the essay as a quarrel or debate with themselves or each other, to investigate some problematic issue, something that demonstrably makes a difference. Writing several papers over the semester, students have the chance to apply what they are learning about reading and writing. Before reading the new essay I review their previous writing so I can mark progress or note patterns. I schedule at least two conferences with every student, in which we reexamine their writing, and agree on strategies for improvement. I preach more rigorous revision of first drafts, continual raids upon the inarticulate (as T. S. Eliot put it), constant rethinking and rewriting.

Students’ Personal Best

Such hard work is a trying odyssey for all those A students from high school now being held to higher standards. A first-year student at Williams may well become frustrated with such fastidious nit-picking. Without yielding much ground, I sympathize: In office conferences I try to connect with the struggling writer, to sustain her morale or to reassure him. Like a coach I want the kid’s personal best, while I also want them to realize that my seemingly harsh criticisms aren’t personal. It may be painful but is always crucial to separate the fragility of the ego and the effectiveness of the writing. Like a coach I urge the performer to break down and correct the technique leading to the faulty dive or wobbly backhand. When I reiterate that they must revise more stringently, they sigh, "But how do I know when it’s done?" I recount a John McPhee story.

Once in Hershey, Pa., to visit the candy factory, McPhee, viewing vast bubbling vats of chocolate, asked, "How do you know when it’s done?" "Oh, that’s Hector’s job. Hector’s been with Hershey’s forever. He lives in the basement." So McPhee asked the little old man from the basement, "How do you know when it’s done?" Hector stroked his chin and replied, "Well, I try it once, and nope. Bit later I try it again, and still nope. Some time later I go back, dip my finger and lick it, and, yep—now that’s Hershey’s! " When a writer has worked long and hard enough, he knows when it’s Hershey’s!

What I Teach For

My goals in English 101 are both modest and grandiose. Modest in requiring familiarity with the text and seeking fundamental comprehension. Grander because I hope to demonstrate the infinite glory of language deployed by poets, playwrights, and novelists. What a piece of work is a poem, how noble in aspiration! The splendor of literature includes revelations of beauty, indications of subtlety, power, resonance, mastery, which may (but need not necessarily) speak to the big issues: mortality, suffering, longing and loss, faith and despair. The writer’s deployment of language might be delightfully immediate, even teasingly trivial. It’s a performance of verbal virtuosity, and as Robert Frost insists, "All the fun’s in how you say a thing."

My primary purpose in 101 is not to enlist English majors, but to introduce the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. I like to imagine my students, five or ten years after English 101, reading with pleasure and purpose a poem by Louise Glück or Larry Raab in the New Yorker, or attending a play by Chekhov or Harold Pinter, or handing a friend an old copy of Jane Austen or the newest Philip Roth. And perhaps fifteen years later, reading their children The Chronicles of Narnia and The Secret Garden. Or twenty years on, helping their teenagers writing high school essays to worry intelligently about Eudora Welty or Toni Morrison. I hope my 101 class encourages clearer thinking, sharper writing, wider imagining, deeper feeling, and richer experience.

I seriously maintain the pleasure of literary analysis. Though it’s hard work to think precisely, lucidly, logically, it’s also enormously invigorating. I believe in fun, unabashedly advocate excitement, and bear witness to joy. "All the fun’s in how you say a thing," and student readers can discover how to share that enthusiasm. English 101 discussions are usually animated and enjoyable. I stress that our interpretations are tentative, that we may often modify, clarify, sharpen our own formulations. For the undergraduate reader and critic, as for the writer, it’s a performance requiring gusto and heart as well as lucidity and mind. The synthetic process is provisional and cumulative. Contribution to class discussion is part of their work for the term.

Part of teaching, or one kind of teaching, is performance: If you're dramatizing a character in Shakespeare or a humorous episode in Dickens, a little theatricality can't hurt, and it may help an English teacher bear witness to the power of glorious language and the value of critical inquiry. But students are a captive audience, and like most people, they respond more willingly to personality than to complexity, more readily to autobiography than to abstraction. As a young man I overflowed with anecdotes and jokes. Trouble was, even very smart Williams students seemed to remember my incidental one-liners or autobiographical anecdotes better than my meticulous analyses of Hamlet or Lear. The trick is to put personal experience to educational use.

Theory, Thirty Years Later

After thirty years of teaching, I've discovered so many more things I need to say about King Lear or Tom Jones that I have less time for contemporary allusions and amusing digressions. I've deliberately subordinated myself more rigorously to my authors. I once heard a world-renowned musicologist lecture on Handel. Applauded enthusiastically, the lecturer held up a recording and pointed emphatically to the image of Handel. That's now my ideal of teacherly advocacy: The object of veneration is not the lecturer but the work of art. Blessedly, getting older, I care less, or at least not nearly so much, about appearing cool, funny, or attractive; teaching Tristram Shandy or Song of Solomon, I’ll be the Geek of the Week.

The passage of time has necessarily altered my relationships with students. While we no longer like the same music, wear similar clothes, speak a common idiom, I've gained both greater authority and, in some ways, richer connections with students. A teacher needs to be able to hear himself as well as students. At a certain point in this life's odyssey--around the time one starts using phrases like "at a certain point in this life's odyssey"--students stopped calling me by my first name. By the time I was forty, I was gray-haired and unmistakably professorial. When I invited my senior thesis student to call me by my first name, she continued to address me as Professor Bell. I repeated my invitation. The next week she wrote me an abashed confession: "Dear Professor Bell--I'm sorry, I can't call you by your first name. You just don't seem like a 'Bob' to me." Today, if I am ever tempted to "be a Bob," I have two teenage daughters to remind me I'm not.

I think I believe more than I did when I began at Williams that education should be challenging, demanding, even painful; that learning is disorienting, frightening, and overwhelming. But this formulation makes teaching seem awfully somber. It's not. For me teaching is anything but dutiful: It's joyful. I have boundless fun talking about Henry the Fourth or Eudora Welty. I've never had to contrive enthusiasm. And demonstrating it is almost a sacrament--one of the English teacher's means of bearing witness to the value of literature.

The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek for "filled with the gods." A word invented by James Joyce, "joyicity," identifies the author himself with pleasure. I experience joyicity quoting poetry, watching plays, analyzing texts, reveling in felicities of language. I want to convey the fun of reading, thinking, dramatizing, revising, correcting, speculating. I enjoy it every bit as much now as I did in 1972, when I would finish one class and immediately begin day-dreaming about the next. Next fall I will enter another classroom, meet twenty-five eager English majors. For me it is like another visit to Narnia, except that grown-ups can return, perhaps less intoxicated, histrionic, and humorous but more productive, happier, and wiser.

Like an athlete, a teacher must adapt, refine his craft, compensate for attributes that diminish or disappear. My boyhood hero, Ted Williams, wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived. If he wasn't, he came damn close, second only to Babe Ruth. But without a doubt Ted Williams was the greatest old hitter in baseball history. Batting .388 in 1957 was even more amazing than hitting .406 in 1941. I would love to become one of Williams College's great old teachers. It's something to shoot for.

Significant moments in education, I've learned, may be conspicuously un-dramatic. Recently, teaching Richard Wilbur's poem "The Writer," I asked my first-year students what was appealing about the speaker's attitude toward his daughter. Anne Dwyer said softly, "His respect for her." Respectfulness also characterizes the teacher's attitude toward the material and the students. Simone Weil says, "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." I want to demonstrate the efficacy and pleasure of generous attention to literature, to encourage disciplined, imaginative responses to language, and to give pure, sustained attention to the student's reading and writing. The hardest part, where I really earn the big bucks, is grading students' essays--lots of them; it's grueling but gratifying, for it verifies the importance of critical thinking. If an eighteen-year-old is to take very seriously words and ideas, she must perceive that the teacher, her reader, is responding thoughtfully to every idea she has--and to the words she uses to express it.