Last Saturday, virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman was the featured guest on \u2018Wait, Wait, Don\u2019t Tell Me,\u201d my favorite NPR show. I remember something one of my teaching models and mentors in my early years as an assistant professor once revealed that he told his advisees when they sought his input about which courses to take the next semester. \u201cGo for the jockey, not the horse.<\/strong>\u201d I have cultivated my teaching craft for twenty-five years now, all the time making it known to anyone who would listen that I have the greatest job in the world, that I actually consider teaching to be a vocation rather than a job, and that I consider myself to be inordinately privileged to be able to make a decent living doing what I was born to do, something that, This sort of narrative breeds and exudes confidence, so much so that I\u2019ve learned over the years that I often need to tone my enthusiasm for teaching down, lest I be misinterpreted as someone who has a superiority complex and never experiences the insecurities, mistakes, and failures that are necessary parts of a teacher\u2019s life. Trust me, I\u2019ve had more of these than I could possibly remember\u2014the \u201cit isn\u2019t working\u201d moment of alarm happens as frequently now as it ever has. But now it exhilarates rather than frightens me\u2014I have fun with the moments that, in earlier years, might have paralyzed me in front of a class.<\/p>\n A couple of days ago, I introduced a bunch of freshmen to the Scientific Revolution in the interdisciplinary humanities program I direct and teach in. The class immediately brought to mind a class with the same material roughly a year ago with a different pair of colleagues, a class which almost became the sort of nightmare that all teachers fear. I came to class expecting to rely on what I modestly considered to be a fabulous PowerPoint show. And the computer wouldn\u2019t work. What in earlier years would have caused the sweating of bullets instead spawned a few jokes, then a living illustration of the heavenly bodies moving in circles, epicycles, and eccentrics created by my assigning different students the roles of the various planets circling and interweaving with each other, all with the purpose of showing how a beautiful theory can become so complicated over time under the pressure of new and continuing data as to collapse under its own weight. The process of transformation from scared-to-death graduate student to comfortable-in-my-skin professor has been a long one with many landmarks along the way. One of the first was my favorite movie, \u201cDead Poets Society,\u201d which was released in 1989, the very year that I was thrown, as a completely inexperienced and totally frightened graduate student into my own classroom for the first time. It has become trendy recently to trash this movie in various ways,<\/p>\n Dead Poets Society is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities<\/a>,<\/p>\n but I don\u2019t read such critiques. This movie was seminal for me, showed up at the right place at the right time in my life and continues to inspire my teaching energies. The young man expects that Mr. Keating will admire his daring and creativity, but he soon finds out otherwise. \u201cYou being expelled from school is not daring, it\u2019s stupid. You\u2019ll miss some golden opportunities,\u201d says Mr. Keating. \u201cLike what?\u201d \u201cLike, if nothing else, the opportunity to attend my classes.\u201d I want my classes to be like that, I thought. I want to teach classes that will make students glad they came to my school. It\u2019s one thing to see it in a movie, though; ![\"Perlman\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2014\/04\/perlman.jpg\")
<\/a>He was a fascinating interview, full of stories about the world of being a recognized genius in the midst of mere mortals and the world of classical music. Guest host Michael Pesca asked Perlman \u201cwhich would be better\u2014the second-best violinist playing the best violin in the world, or the second-best violin being played by the best violinist in the world?\u201d \u201cThe second one,\u201d Perlman answered immediately, illustrating with a story from the life of another violin virtuoso: A woman once approached ![\"Menuhin\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2014\/04\/menuhin.png\")
<\/a>Yehudi Menuhin after one of his concerts and said \u201cyour violin was beautiful tonight.\u201d Menuhin held his Stradivarius to his ear and said \u201cThat\u2019s funny . . . I don\u2019t hear anything!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>A mediocre horse ridden by a great jockey will do better in a race than Secretariat ridden by a mediocre jockey. Something taught by the best professor on campus will always be better than the greatest syllabus in the universe taught by a less stellar professor. Arrogant? Probably. But absolutely true. Over the years I have often said that students will choose \u201cchallenging but interesting\u201d over \u201cboring but easy\u201d every time. I have seen enough counterexamples over the years to know that this is not a self-evident truth, but it is better than that\u2014a time-tested hypothesis.<\/p>\n<\/a>if I were independently wealthy, I would do for free. I pulled off my most effective April Fool\u2019s Day stunt ever\u00a0last year\u00a0when I posted on Facebook that \u201cDespite my frequent claims to the contrary, I have decided that my job really sucks.\u201d People who don\u2019t know me very well immediately commiserated with \u201cI know, it\u2019s that kind of day, isn\u2019t it?\u201d and \u201cI know it\u2019s a thankless job, but if it helps you\u2019re doing great!\u201d A colleague from my department came up to me at lunch the next day and said, with appropriate <\/a>Eeyore-like visage, \u201cVance, I\u2019m really sorry.\u201d I think he was disappointed when he found out that it was a joke. Those in my closer circle of friends and colleagues knew, however, after a few seconds of confusion, that it was a prank. \u201cYou had me going for a second\u2014Happy April Fool\u2019s Day!\u201d was their typical response. Because they knew that if I ever came to the point that I said \u201cmy job really sucks!\u201d and meant it, I would no longer be me. Simple as that.<\/p>\n<\/a>My guess is that the students will remember what we did far longer than if they had seen it on a screen. One of my colleagues asked \u201cHow did you come up with that idea?\u201d My answer, as always, was \u201cI don\u2019t know\u2014it just seemed that it might work.\u201d<\/p>\nDozens of scenes could illustrate; one will suffice. As the dynamic young teacher Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, gradually inspires his students to think for themselves, his young charges start taking their new-found freedom and running with it in unpredictable ways, as teenage young men are apt to do. One of these young men suggests at a school assembly that God wants girls to attend their all-boys school; the sheer outrageousness of the idea as well as the impromptu and disrespectful manner of his expressing it almost gets the student expelled.<\/p>\n<\/a>it\u2019s another thing to find the path that might lead, over a career, in that direction.<\/p>\n