Resembling the Picture

Another academic year is in the books, and as I will gladly be shifting into sabbatical mode in six weeks, I’m reminiscing about how I became a teacher. It is a good thing when your conviction that you are perfectly suited for your profession is confirmed by an objective source. That’s not exactly what happened to me the other day, but when I took yet another internet personality test—“What career should you actually have?”

What Profession Should You Have?

I was pleased to be told that

YOU GOT PROFESSOR! You are a thinker, in constant search of knowledge and answers to life’s most illusive [sic] questions. You love to analyze everything, testing out theories and pushing mental boundaries. Basically you’re an Einstein, but then again you probably already knew that.

I probably should not put much stock in a quiz that does not know the difference between “illusive” and “elusive,” and had a student made this error I would have directed them to a thesaurus, but I’ll take affirmation wherever I can get it. Several of my colleagues also got “Professor,” while a couple of others got ‘Writer.” I would have been happy with that as well, as long as I could keep teaching to pay the bills. One of my colleagues in the music department got “Astronaut.” That sucks. It’s going to be annoying for her to have to quit a tenured professor position and start all over again.

I have said to anyone who would listen that I was born to do what I do for a living for so long that I think I actually believe it. But I was not always this confident in my classroom abilities. I remember clearly the day, over twenty-five years ago, when it occurred to me that I had painted myself into a corner that I was not at all sure I wanted to be in. All of have heard of famous persons in all walks of life with philosophy degrees (George Soros, Angela Davis, Thomas Jefferson, Alex Trebek, Susan Sontag, Steve Martin—just to name a few), but their philosophy degrees were a BA. Once you are deep into the several additional years of earning a PhD in philosophy, available options narrow. The day I learned that my graduate assistantship for my second year at Marquette would be a teaching assistantship rather than the research assistantship I had during my first year, it dawned on me—I’m going to be a teacher. And I had no idea whether I’d be any good at it or if I would even like it.

I had been a TA for a couple of years during my Master’s program at the University of Wyoming, where the job consisted of doing everything the professor of the 150+ student Introduction to Philosophy course didn’t feel like doing. That included all of the grading and trying to explain every Friday to two groups of twenty students what the hell the professor had been talking about on Monday and Wednesday. My Friday students seemed to like me, but that’s probably because anyone with communication skills slightly better than Donald Trump’s could have been clearer than that particular professor. At Marquette, however, a TA had her or his very own class, designing it from scratch, giving all the lectures, seeing all of the students, and grading everything from beginning to end. Just like a real teacher—except that I had never been in front of a classroom in my life, other than to make a few five or ten-minute presentations over the years. So how is this ultra-introverted student, who is far more confident in his writing skills than his people skills, supposed to morph into a teacher?

Although the graduate program in philosophy at Marquette did have a large safety net spread under its TAs, the process was pretty much like throwing a person who wants to learn how to swim into the deep end of the pool and seeing what happens. Since in most PhD programs there are no courses in “How to Teach,” the assumption being that the ton of esoteric and possibly useless information in a grad student’s brain will somehow magically be communicated effectively to a bunch of undergrads who don’t care. I decided to teach by shameless imitation of the best professors I had, a decision that Aristotle—who said that a key to the moral life is to imitate those who are already the person you want to become—would have been proud of. My two mentor/models could not have been more dissimilar.

Father Jack Treloar was a Jesuit who looked like a short Marine drill sergeant, with less than two percent body fat and a grey flat-top. He scared the shit out of undergraduates; we graduate students who got to know him knew that he was a softie at heart. His favorite thing to do when he came to the house for dinner was to sit on the floor and play with my sons (8 and 6). His brilliance in the classroom was built on a foundation of crystal clarity and organization bordering on obsessive. Fr. Treloar’s flow chart “road map” through the labyrinthine thickets of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was so effective that I have shamelessly used it regularly, with only minor changes, over the past two decades with my undergraduates. As I often tell my students, “when you use someone else’s ideas, it is called plagiarism; when professors steal each other’s ideas, it is called creative pedagogy.” Fr. Treloar asked me a number years ago to stop calling him “Father Treloar” and call him “Jack”—I couldn’t (and can’t) do it. I’m not comfortable being on a first name basis with an icon.

Dr. Tom Prendergast was undoubtedly the most enthusiastic teacher I have ever encountered. His obvious love of his subject matter of expertise (Early Modern Philosophy—Descartes through Kant) was so infectious that it spread through the classroom like a virus. The virus became so rooted in me that I took three seminars with him and he ended up agreeing to be the director for my dissertation on Descartes’ ethics. His class was energized by passion, not organization or necessarily even logical precision, qualities that he also lacked in his life outside the classroom. Two stories will suffice.

Tom (I had no trouble calling him that at his request) lived in one of the Lake Michigan lakeside suburbs of Milwaukee; we would meet at his favorite restaurant every other week to discuss the latest draft material from my dissertation. It was always Dutch treat—I usually only got a beer because that’s all graduate students can afford. But our final meeting before my dissertation defense happened to fall on my birthday. Jeanne behind the scenes let Tom know that it was my birthday, and Tom greeted me at the restaurant with a hearty “Happy birthday! It’s my treat—get anything you want!” We celebrated both my birthday and the completion of my dissertation with dinner—very cool, until the bill came and Tom realized he didn’t have his wallet. I didn’t even have a credit card, but through some beneficial grant from the gods of philosophy I happened to have just enough cash to pay the bill and avoid washing dishes. I didn’t have enough for a tip, though—Tom promised he would return and leave a tip after he retrieved his wallet from home. I doubt he remembered.

On the evening after my successful dissertation defense a few weeks later, Tom and his wife Barbara took Jeanne and me out to dinner to celebrate. Yes, we made sure he had his wallet. It was beginning to snow, so Tom dropped the three of us off at the restaurant door and went to find parking on the street, joining us within several minutes. When we left the restaurant a couple of hours later, three or four inches of new fallen snow had covered everything. Barbara joked “I’ll bet Tom won’t remember where he parked the car!” She was right—he couldn’t remember. We spent the next ten to fifteen minutes brushing snow off all the cars in the surrounding blocks until we discovered theirs. That was Dr. Prendergast.

As I started thinking about teaching my first class, I sort of figured that if I could combine a bit of Fr. Treloar’s organization and clarity with Dr. Prendergast’s passion and enthusiasm, I might become a serviceable teacher. The organization and clarity came much more naturally to this extreme introvert than the passion and enthusiasm—I brought the energy of a performer to the front of the class, playing a role that ultimately became my own. Almost twenty-five years later, with many mistakes, embarrassing failures, increasing joy, and a Teacher of the Year award behind me, I can, if I step back for a moment, see the imprint of both of these master teachers and generous mentors on everything I do for and in the classroom.

Was I born to be a teacher, or did I become the teacher that I am through necessity and the extraordinary blessing of having models of what I wanted to become smack in front of me? Iris Murdoch writes that “Man is the creature who makes pictures of himself, then comes to resemble the pictures.” Just as Ernest in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Great Stone Face” came to resemble what he had spent his life looking at, so I have come to resemble those teachers who I observed so closely many years ago. Perhaps I observed too closely. I am extraordinarily organized in my planning for a class, a semester, or future blog posts as well as in my administrative duties, but often can’t find my reading glasses or wallet.