That’s a wrap for another academic year, number 34 since I walked across a stage in May 1991 and received my PhD diploma. Where has the time gone? Commencement exercises were last weekend, final grades were submitted the weekend before that, I’ve even managed to set up the on line sites for all three of my classes next fall. Summer and returning to my book project awaits.
The last academic event of the semester (other than commencement) is often a faculty workshop, usually sponsored by the large team-taught, interdisciplinary program on campus required of all students during their first four semesters. More than 80 faculty from a number of disciplines teach in the program. Some faculty, such as I, have taught in the program non-stop for decades, while others are brand new. Last week’s workshop, attended by 30-40 faculty, was a day-long program focused on crossing that gap. There were a dozen or so veterans of the course, recruited by the program director to be sources of stories and experiences (as well as, perhaps, wisdom) from the trenches from two dozen or so faculty who will be teaching in the program for the first time during the next academic year.
I sat toward the back of the tiered classroom where the workshop was held, offering insights on occasion as well as a few of the unexpected remarks that my colleagues have come to expect from me over the years. For instance, the program director led a session called “Do’s and Don’ts of Team Teaching”–she had prepared a PowerPoint slide with several important items in the “Do’s: and “Don’ts” columns. After her short presentation, she asked if any of the veterans wanted to add something to either column. My contribution was “Don’t be a dick.”
A day or so before the workshop, the program director asked me if I would prepare a 5-10 minute presentation on leading two-hour seminars. At the start of my presentation, I said that everything I know about seminars began with my undergraduate education at St. John’s College, a Great Books college where the four-year curriculum is fixed and every class is a seminar.
It is now 51 years since I began my freshman year at St. John’s College. The older I get, the more I realize what a life-shaping experience I was beginning. I have written frequently on this blog about how the Great Books program shaped me as a teacher and how it stirred my soul in lasting ways. But one of the most memorable regular occurrences during my years in Santa Fe had nothing to do with tutors, books, labs or seminars.
The heart of the St. John’s curriculum is the seminar, which occurs every Monday and Thursday night from 8-10. Actually I don’t remember a seminar ever ending at 10:00. They always went at least until 10:30, then continued informally in the coffee shop until midnight. What was happening in the hour before seminar on Thursday nights? Students rushing to finish the reading? Checking notes and annotations one more time? Grabbing a quick forty winks? None of the above, because at 7:00 PM every Thursday night in the lower dorms common room everyone—and I mean everyone, tutors included—gathered to watch “The Muppet Show.”
Strange to say, “The Muppet Show” was just irreverent and bizarre enough to be a perfect fit for the young misfits who had chosen to spend their first years of college immersed in the “Great Books,” the best texts the Western tradition had to offer organized into a curriculum so rigid and liturgical as to not allow students a single elective choice in class offerings until their Junior year (and even then only one class). I was too young to know then what I know now, fifty-one years older and with more than thirty-five years of college teaching experience behind me: a college curriculum with no electives runs so against the normal grain of pedagogy in this country that it sounds more suitable for youngsters from Mars than for earthlings.
“The Muppet Show” was more for adults (or at least non-children) than for kids; definitely not your kid’s or grandkid’s Sesame Street, although many of the characters were the same. Current events, the best human guest stars (none of whom visited more than once)—in many ways it played the role that shows like “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live” have played in subsequent decades. I have occasionally taken the “Which Muppet Are You?” online quiz, and regularly get the same result—Kermit the Frog. Nothing against Kermit or against the quiz—but this is wrong, because I have known for many years which Muppet I am (actually two of them).
Since the first time I observed Statler and Waldorf criticizing and mocking everyone and everything on the stage from their perch in the box seats, I recognized them as stuffed soul mates. The natural foundations of my sense of humor are sarcasm, irreverence, bemusement, and irony—an extreme case of “don’t ever take anything too seriously.” Their removal from the action, along with their self-authorization to critique the action from afar, is very attractive to an introvert; it also provides an avenue for the introvert to be “involved” without really being involved.
It could be that Statler and Waldorf did nothing but sit up in the box seats and critique even when they were young muppets, but I choose to believe that, given their elderly status, they were “in the trenches” guys for decades who eventually earned the right to step back and make fun of others making the same mistakes they made in their youth. I resonate with Statler and Waldorf because their senses of humor are just like mine and they strike a deep introverted chord in me. At this point in my career I not only resonate with S and W—I have become them. I have earned the right.
I am greatly enjoying the part of my career where (I hope) my administrative duties are behind me and all I have to do is teach and write. I’ve done my time. Of course as they say, if you want to give God a good laugh, tell her your plans. But there they are.
Whatever the future holds, I believe that as I proceed through my seventies (which begin next March), I am entitled to channel Statler and Waldorf on whatever occasions I deem appropriate. I even look a lot like them. They say that couples who have been together for a long time start looking like each other (I hope not, for Jeanne’s sake), just as dogs and their owners start resembling each other. I’m not sure about that. But it is indeed true that over time each of us starts to resemble our stuffed soul mate. In my case, it could be a lot worse.
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