Publications
Articles

Excerpt from “How To Become The Teacher Who Makes The Difference—An Anti-Romantic Theory of Pedagogy: Principles, not Personalities."

Like Duke Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, American culture is in love with love. That is, Americans are generally in love with feelings, and frequently give feelings an automatic credibility, especially if they are intense, merely because they exist. Like the feel of sex and the taste of food, intense emotions are compelling to experience or observe, and many Americans respond as if emotions possess a default legitimacy on the grounds of intensity alone. Our culture endlessly extols the virtues of “listening to your heart,” “letting go,” “not living in your head,” “being swept away by love,” “being lifted up by passion,” and so on. In thousands of narratives from soap operas to romance novels to the persistent message in Star Wars that warriors and lovers should connect with “The Force” using instinct rather than reason, our culture reinforces the notion that the heart, not the head, is not only the real authority in human affairs, but also the ultimate justification for our actions. One of our culture’s most common clichés about romance is, “you can’t choose who you love.” Translation: love is all about feelings. Thought, judgment, and reason play no role in love. We don’t choose. Love chooses, and sweeps us up in rhapsodic flight (until, not uncommonly, rhapsodic love loses its lift and drops us from 300 feet above the cement).

Moreover, our culture combines its prejudice in favor of rhapsodic emotions with its endless appetite for celebrity worship in a way that turns celebrity watching into a kind of pop art form for the ceaseless expression of our passion for passion. Entertainment Weekly is available in a print format once a week, in a TV format nightly, and on the web constantly, not to mention an endless stream of stories about celebrity high jinks that come from the mainstream media. It is a disquieting thought but an obvious truth that there are millions of people in America who really care about whether or not Angela Jolie and Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Jennifer Aston and Vince Vaughn, and hundreds of other well-known celebrity couples are having affairs, getting married, getting divorced, getting fat, getting thin, getting drunk, getting sober, getting religion, looking bad, looking good, having liposuction, having babies, getting rich, getting bored, getting it on, or just getting along.

What does this cultural wallowing in passion for passion’s sake combined with celebrity worship have to do with teaching? Unfortunately, it has a lot to do with teaching, not because these cultural obsessions form an explicit ideology about teaching, but because they form a kind of cultural atmosphere that makes teachers feel as if charismatic performance is obligatory, and also soaks itself like a dye into every expectation that students have about their teachers and classes. It would be better, actually, if the American love of passion for its own sake and its love of celebrity worship for the sake of titillation did yield an explicit ideology of teaching, because an ideology would be easier to resist than a general cultural atmosphere, which carries immense force because it seems to exist everywhere in general, yet is profoundly difficult to corner or attack because it also seems to exist nowhere in particular.

One pernicious effect of this general cultural atmosphere is that, in America, both teachers and students enter their classrooms mostly unaware of how intensely the atmosphere of contemporary culture leads them to expect that good teaching and effective learning will depend on teacherly charisma and pedagogical sexiness—by which I mean the teacher’s ability to make class seem as exciting as a TV game show, and to give it a slight smattering of glamour to boot—or at the very least that success will depend on the teacher and the student feeling that they have incompatible personalities. Often, a teacher and a student who grate on each other will readily and easily accept a diagnosis of “personality incompatibility” as a terminal judgment about why they do not need to listen seriously to each other. Students and teachers alike hope to wind up loving each other, not often sexually, of course, but in the passionately emotive way so frequently represented in such movies as Children of a Lesser God, Dead Poets Society, Renaissance Man, Dangerous Minds, and Freedom Writers. In consequence, expectations about intimacy of emotional compatibility, teacherly charisma, and pedagogical sexiness matter both to students and teachers more than it needs to and much more than it should. The conflation of good teaching and teacherly charisma is so deeply entrenched in the psychology of American schooling that neither students nor teachers (who may have fleeting intuitions about the poverty of such expectations) will find very few cultural resources to help them think their way around them. Thus they are often trapped by bogus expectations, and both groups wind up feeling disappointed and frustrated with their classroom experience on the grounds of personal incompatibilities that, in fact, are not of central importance to either good teaching or effective learning.

In what follows, I intend to argue that not only do teachers not have to rely on teacherly charisma and pedagogical sexiness to be good teachers, but that they also do not have to rely for their teaching—as they are so often left to do by graduate schools that mostly gloss over teaching—on trial-and-error, good will, and intuitions alone. Trial-and-error, good will, and intuitions are neither valueless nor irrelevant to good teaching, but in this country the typical system of graduate education and the typical modes of professional socialization for new college teachers leave teachers who want to be good teachers thinking that trial-and-error, good will, and intuitions are the only tools available to them. In the pedagogy seminars for college teachers that I began conducting as long ago as the mid-eighties, I have seen over and over again how surprised—and relieved—college teachers are to discover that this is not the case. The idea that teaching can be thought about systematically apart from personalities and charisma is a notion that many college teachers, already committed to the value of systematic thinking within their disciplines but who did not know that it was a possibility in their teaching, heartily welcome.

© 2009 Copyright Marshall Gregory