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From "Do we Teach Disciplines or Do we Teach Students? What Difference Does it Make?" ADE Bulletin. (forthcoming)

The single most difficult notion for graduate students and new professors to grasp about teaching—and, indeed, many experienced teachers never grasp this point either—is that successful teaching to undergraduates has very little to do with the degree of one’s mastery of disciplinary knowledge. I am not making the well-rehearsed point that there is a big difference between knowing disciplinary information and knowing how to teach it. I am making a different point and, I hope, a deeper point. Allow me to illustrate my point, like Socrates, using my own ignorance as the starting point of my argument. After diligent study in my field that began with voracious childhood reading, followed by a college English major and a PhD in English, I think that at this point in my life, at age sixty-six, I may know about ten percent of all the disciplinary knowledge available to me. Actually, I think that’s an optimistic estimate, but for purposes of argument and diminishment of embarrassment, let’s assume that it’s true. (It’s hard to keep up with the output of Harold Bloom alone, much less find the time to fill in my chagrined ignorance of Schiller, Rabelais, Henry Gates, the Spasmodic Poets, and David Foster Wallace.) If you are like me, every time you look at your “must read” list you feel a pressure in your chest as if you might be having a heart attack. Your “should read” list could stretch to Tokyo. But my students are even worse off. They probably learn no more than ten percent of the disciplinary knowledge that I introduce to them in my classes, and if you think they remember ten percent of that ten percent six months after they leave my classes, you’re the kind of person who buys ten lottery tickets every single day on the grounds that “someone has to win.”

The point I am inviting you to consider is that compared to all there is to learn in any field, we are all pikers, stumblers, and terminal beginners. But while I am aware of the huge blank spaces of ignorance in my learning, my students are not aware of those blank spaces, and they nibble like mice around the edges of what I don’t know and often mistake me for a vastly learned man. They say so in their course evaluation forms. “Dr. Gregory knows everything about literature and literary criticism.” “Yeah?,” I want to say, “and you would be measuring my knowledge against what standard?” The salient inference here is that in undergraduate teaching we are all doing no more than dabbling around the edges of a vast pool of knowledge and information that not even we as experts claim to digest. This observation forces on us the following conclusion. If we are all getting so little disciplinary work done, and if undergraduate teaching does actually work a fair amount of the time, it cannot be because we are all doing a box office business expanding the boundaries of our students’ disciplinary knowledge. It has to be working for reasons other than disciplinary reasons.

© 2007 Copyright Marshall Gregory