Worst Professor Ever

WoPro’s Note: today’s post courtesy of your favorite guest blogger, Dr. $hiraz, whose pedagogy I would emulate were I still teaching.

I am a medievalist. Sometimes I lurk in dusty old world libraries running my hands over ancient vellum and I spend months trying to comprehend the labyrinthine thoughts of long dead monks. Some of the texts I study are obscure, but poked and prodded, coerced a little, they speak to larger issues of culture, creativity, and education, and tell us about the strange inner worlds – alien and oddly familiar – of our predecessors. Then, to keep me in touch with the living, I teach courses on the history of the Middle Ages.

This, obviously, is too much fun, and so there is annual penance: teaching the first half of Western Civilization. The subject matter is fine – ancient and medieval history – and covering 2000+ years in a semester has its own appeal. For a start it means you don’t have to spend much time on Thucydides.

The problem is the students.  No, that is unfair. The problem is that the college requires students be subjected to a general education class entirely against their will. So they sit and stare and twitch and Tweet, cultivating a finely calibrated blend of ennui and hostility, as I propound upon Greek tragedies whose subject matter – incest, cannibalism, and matricide – has been rendered banal by countless Jerry Springer reruns.  I can’t talk about the meeting of Priam and Achilles in the Iliad any more. To me it is one of the most moving scenes in literature – the old king and the young warrior who killed his son, united in grief, each reminding the other of what he has lost. But I cannot do the scene justice; my audience are yawning and scratching and checking the time.

Don’t I believe in the values of general education? I study the formation of the western curriculum – the trivium (that’s trivia in the plural) and quadrivium of the seven liberal arts in the medieval schools. Well, in theory, yes – the principle of sending forth citizens educated, at least a little, in the methods and contents of a range of disciplines is great. In practice, though, I wouldn’t be so happy in a calculus class, and I don’t believe in punitive education for others either.

Of course, we would all rather teach to people who want to learn, but faced with the reality of another soul-crushing semester staring into the void, I decided to take drastic steps.  A year from now, my gen. ed. students won’t remember most of what I say. They’ll forget Parmenides and Pericles and my favorite Athenian bad boy Alcibiades, no matter how much I talk about him. They might remember that Carolingians wore rat fur, but not recall the coronation date of Charlemagne (December 25, AD 800 – could it be easier?).  And, really, that is fine. All those pieces of information I arranged in themes and assembled as grand narratives (while telling them not to trust grand narratives) will only be Post-Its and pen caps and paperclips behind the sofa.  History is not about a series of dates – that’s chronology – and it’s not about remembering factoids – that’s Wikipedia, as long as you’re not fussy (or the library’s website if you are).

So, instead of trying to get them to cram all these things into their minds for a handful of days, I asked what matters? I asked them what matters to you? on the first day and what matters to Achilles? the next week. What do we want and how do we get it? What makes us happy? What do we do that means anything?

Yes, I give the primary sources a context but I don’t expect them to memorize it. They can bring a handwritten page of those already pallid facts with them to the test. The cheat sheet (as they insist on calling it) won’t forget any faster. Then, I get to ask them the really hard questions. The ones I want answered too.

It’s Existential Crisis 101, but perhaps it will mean something a year or a decade from now. Maybe my best hope is that they don’t sell back their copies of Marcus Aurelius and that he sits on a shelf, quiet and unconcerned, waiting for a time when he is vaguely recalled, taken down, and read. The dead can be good company in hard times. Machiavelli knew that.

(WoPro adds: Squee! I ♥ Machiavelli and Marcus Aurelius!)

I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, class prep – reading Marcus Aurelius again.

(Oh, and Rome’s fall? It’s trick question.  You can say AD 476, if you want an arbitrary date, or a 1000 years later, but that’s another story.)

Tags: Achilles, Alcibiades, Carolingians, Charlemagne, civ classes, date of rome's fall, exisistential crisis, existentialism, Greek tragedy, Iliad, Jerry Springer, Machiavelli, Marcus Aurelius, medieval, middle ages, Parmenides, pedagogy, pericles, Priam, trivia, trivium, uses of the past, western civ