Fearless Teaching

 To a large extent, we teach the way we've been taught, or at least the ways that took hold and made us want to learn.  I was lucky as a graduate student: I had a handful of  wonderful instructors who weren't afraid to make their classes a genuine marketplace of ideas, people like Donald Murray, Tom Newkirk, Melody Graulich and many others.  I later learned that this approach was grounded in constructivist theory, especially the idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon--we make meaning together.  At the heart of this an open inquiry into what we think about what is known.   From class to class, we may not know where this will take us.  But the payoff--discovery--is well worth the risks.  This is something I recognize not just as a teacher but as a writer.

In practical terms, this means that in most of my classes I listen more than some of your other instructors.  I take notes on things that students say that I think are particularly insightful or provocative; in a sense, I'm a student, too.  I will guide discussion, certainly, and when appropriate share knowledge that might fill in our understandings of what scholars have said.  But I'm not inclined to lecture.  To students who prefer professors who profess, my teaching style might seem strangely passive, or perhaps even manipulative:  "Why doesn't he just tell us what he thinks or what he knows!"  The simple answer is that I'm convinced that you will learn less if I do.

Some years ago, the literary scholar Jane Tompkins published "Pedagogy of the Distressed," an article on teaching that strongly influenced my thinking. (I've attached it in case you want to take a look).  For many years, Tompkins taught in the conventional way--lecturing, leading, professing, establishing her authority, (which, by the way, is considerable).  At some point she realized that her motives for teaching that way weren't as pure as she thought.  Tompkins wrote that she suddenly understood that "most of the time" she was concerned about  "three things: a) to show the students how smart I was, b) to show them how knowledgeable I was, and c)to show them how well-prepared I was for class. I had been putting on a performance whose true goal was not to help the students learn but to perform before them in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me."  Tompkins called this the "performance model" of teaching, and concluded that what was behind it was fear.  She decided to stop being afraid.

This spoke to me, because like Tompkins, I've always felt a bit like an impostor in front of a college classroom.  On bad days, I feel like the dumbest guy in the room. But I was lucky.  I had the good fortune to have teachers who didn't respond to fear by continually demonstrating how smart they were, and so I could see another way to teach, one that isn't really about me at all.

How to Kill a Passenger Pigeon

I began a long-term writing project this summer on birds.  I mean to be deliberately vague. Though I'm sorely tempted to name the project--this is a book, this is an essay, this is a collection--I've learned that this isn't a decision one can make for some time.  The material--if it is useful--will tell me.  The poet Richard Hugo distinguished between the "triggering subject" and the "generated subject," and he advised poets to welcome the triggering subject but always be on the lookout for the generated one.  This, he thought, was the real subject of the poem.  This is an enormously inefficient process, of course.  I have spent two months reading and writing in my notebook about birds and I still have no grasp on the slippery fish.  What I do have are things that get my attention.  For instance, I've read extensively about the extinction of the passenger pigeon this summer, and I encountered an account of the last great flock of the birds in Arkansas in around 1877.  The size of these flocks is unimaginable--it could take an entire day for it to pass--and witnesses said that the thrum of a million wings made it nearly impossible to speak.  There was a "pigeon" smell, too, as the flock passed over.  The birds would roost in mature forests, a single tree so adorned with birds that “pigeoneers,” hunters of the bird, were drawn as much to the incessant crack of fracturing limbs and branches as the birds’ cooing.  Excrement covered the ground like a snow.  Such was the flock that descended on Hickory Plains, Arkansas.

Pigeon killing was an industry back then and the methods were crude. Pigeoneers would capture the birds long sticks, nets,and guns.  But the saw may have been the most effective weapon; hunters just cut down the trees in which the birds nested, and the sound of falling timber added to the chorus of cracking limbs, cooing, and gun blasts.  Assisted by the telegram, word traveled fast when a big flock alighted, and when word went out about the wild pigeons in Hickory Plain, an army of hunters arrived and the birds--particularly the "squabs," young birds that were especially good eating--died by the thousands.  It is easy, in retrospect, to condemn such a slaughter.  But the flocks were so large that the hunters took only a fraction of the birds.  It was beyond belief, even as the great flocks began to disappear by 1877, that the wild pigeon was in danger.

The hunt in Hickory Plains, Arkansas, went on for days until, by accident apparently, someone started a fire in the dense woods. When nesting, passenger pigeons took turns leaving the roost to look for food, the females leaving in the morning and coming back in the afternoon, and then the males took their turn.  The birds would sometimes fly a hundred miles to find suitable forage.  To the horror of witnesses, the pigeons did not abandon their nests as the woods burned around them, and the returning birds simply flew into the conflagration.  "They poured into  that fire by the hundreds," said one observer, "keeping it up all week while that roost was burning.  The ground was alive with naked pigeons that had the feathers singed off of them...Ever since that fire there have been no more wild pigeons in Arkansas."