Class Not Dismissed

Reflections on Undergraduate Education and Teaching the Liberal Arts

By Anthony Aveni

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2014 Anthony Aveni
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9781-60732-302-0

Contents

1 Introduction,
2 Why I Teach,
3 What I Teach,
4 How I Teach,
5 Questioning Teaching,
6 Epilogue: Class (Not) Dismissed,
Notes,

CHAPTER 1

1 Introduction

At first I had in mind a set of memoirs filled with lasting moments in and around my classroom, interactions with students and colleagues, the worst and best experiences on campus, moments of reflection about those I hold dear who mentored me in my career as teacher and scholar: what you might expect from a prof who has held one and only one job his entire professional life, a job — how I hate to call it that — he’s loved from day one and continues to cherish. Having completed my fiftieth year of service at Colgate University, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, I have told so many teaching-related stories that friends have suggested I ought to catalog them by number.

Then I began to think more about the serious, complex issues involved in the process of teaching and learning. I had thought about them before, discussed them with fellow educators, even played a role in implementing new ways of educating young people at the college: How do you measure effective teaching? Is there really a conflict between creating knowledge (scholarship) and disseminating it (teaching)? How do you hold to a college’s mission to offer the very best education in a changing world, a world in which the teacher and what he teaches has lately been cast in shadowy light? I needed to deal with these pressing issues too. I wondered: Does all that I have to share about what I have lived and learned from more than half a century in the classroom, a time that covers more than one-fourth of the entire existence of the venerable institution I still serve, require two separate books?

Almost never having come across a book about education that wasn’t as dry as dust, I decided to use salient memories to support and enhance themes related to modes of acquiring and disseminating knowledge to young people. Class Not Dismissed is my attempt to parlay what friends call my natural sense of humor with my take on the profession by threading stories, some laughable, others deeply serious, into a narrative that gets at things I believe are important to both teachers and students (I’ve italicized them in the text). My goal is to share real stories about everyday college life that might help promote a dialogue on serious educational issues, many of which, even after all these years, I still haven’t fully worked out.

As is obvious from the table of contents, I have chosen the standard journalistic “why? what? how?” format to set up the narrative. “Why I Teach” (chapter 2) begins with the qualities I remember best in those who inspired me to make life choices. I also take account of what fellow teachers have to say about their memorable mentors and why they share my profession. As you might guess, it’s all about passion. So much of what delights us as teachers emanates from paying witness to what I like to call the “breathing process.” Learning is like being born. It begins with a gasp, an unsteady, assisted intake of knowledge and ideas in a strange, threatening environment. Then it gradually grows, settles in, becomes more deeply rooted and more controlled. Effective learning has so much to do with your ability to take over and breathe on your own. To breathe life into my account, I’ve incorporated stories of my own unsteady breaths as a novice teacher.

Chapter 3, “What I Teach,” opens with the horror story of the first time I was asked to conduct a class in a subject area I knew little about. My initial resistance to the liberal arts processual mandate of helping students become aware of the values that lie at the core of their identities loomed as a frightening task. There I was, stranded in an intellectual wilderness, worlds away from home discipline. I also share my thoughts and feelings about another uncomfortable struggle in which I tried to balance dedication to my own specialty and an increasing desire to contribute to a new interdisciplinary inquiry.

My narrative necessitates dealing with a little history about where the idea of the liberal arts originated and how it developed and changed in the American academy, especially at my home institution. Little did I realize, when I entered Colgate as a yet-uncertified professional astronomer at age twenty-five, that I would be called upon to spearhead the first major revision of the college’s general education program in the post — World War II era. Some of the bizarre suggestions I received from fellow profs about how to revise gen ed (a task I’ve likened to moving a graveyard), though sincerely intended, are too precious not to share, especially those I encountered in dialogues with my imaginative colleagues next to the fancy espresso machine I purchased with a large chunk of my first year’s budget — all in the spirit of promoting academic discourse.

What does it mean to be educated? Is it only about acquiring a body of knowledge, or does it have as much to do with experiencing the process of how you come to know what you never knew before? Product vs. process: that’s the essential tension between the two goals that challenge all teachers. I deal with this in chapter 4, “How I Teach.” Because I believe in learning by sharing both negative and positive experiences, I begin with stories that taught me how not to teach. Much of my “how” section focuses on method and the big debate about whether to lecture or lead discussions. Both are viable teaching techniques, and each requires a lot of time and thought for a teacher to become really effective. Rather than simply resort to boring lists of how to do this or how not to do that, again I thought it best to convey my ideas on methods of teaching through storytelling. I want to share some engaging tales of life experience in the classroom as a way to raise questions about how we all might make teaching more effective.

Chapter 5, “Questioning Teaching,” is a bit more opinionated. Here I single out what I believe are the most pressing problems and issues confronting teachers and students: Should professors be given tenure, essentially a guaranteed job for life? Where do the roles of parents and teachers crisscross one another? How should we assess quality teaching? How much attention should be paid to student as opposed to peer evaluation? Can vocational training and the liberal arts coexist constructively? Where does technology belong in the classroom? What’s behind the current lecture-on-a-laptop trend? Will the Free Internet College transform the future of American education? Finally, I end on one of today’s most hotly debated questions. Being a student today is a far cry from what it was when I enrolled in college: the debt crisis didn’t exist, and there were jobs aplenty. So, why go to college anyway?

Having been involved in interdisciplinary studies long before it became fashionable, my perspective on education tends to be a bit broader than that of most college teachers. Though I was trained in the sciences, I hold a joint appointment in the social sciences, a result of venturing long ago outside my discipline of astronomy into what stargazing means in other cultures. (They call that anthropology in the academy.) I’ve also held visiting appointments in the humanities at other universities. And I have written books, including two for children, that cut across the trinity of curricula: the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

In sum, I wrote Class Not Dismissed because I felt the need to say something about what academic life is like in practice. I want to share the joy and the despair, the high and the low points in a profession I would trade for no other. Passion. That’s the single quality I wish those who read this book would feel about what they do with their lives, no matter what profession they may choose. So whether you’re a fellow teacher, a student in or about to enter college, or one who has been there and has had occasion to reflect on your experience of college life, I hope my stories about life and learning connect with you.

CHAPTER 2

Why I Teach

In studying the convoluted orbits of the stars my feet do not touch the earth, and, seated at the table of Zeus himself, I am nurtured with celestial ambrosia.

— Claudius Ptolemy

To get an education you have to hang around until you catch on.

— Robert Frost

I Love You, Miss Cohen

I dedicate Class Not Dismissed to Miss Sarah Cohen, my second-grade teacher at the Truman Street School in New Haven, Connecticut. Because it is so often the case that someone’s gift to us early in life goes unappreciated until much later, I’ve lost track of her. I’m not even sure whether her version of Sarah comes with an “h.”

Miss Cohen was tall, dark, late-thirty-ish, with a slightly raspy voice (she was a heavy smoker). Gentle in her demeanor, extremely patient, and — as anyone would know who spent five minutes in her classroom or only peered through one of its glass windows and watched her move and smile and gesticulate — totally in love with her kids. She was also way ahead of her time as a classroom innovator, and this is where she touched me most deeply. Sure, she taught the three Rs, but she also gave her kids plenty of rope to explore. And she indulged our passions unabashedly. She would often respond to a question with “let’s do it and find out!” You know the type.

What Sarah Cohen kindled in me was chutzpah in a positive sense — a kind of audacity that manifested itself in my building up enough self-confidence to dare to do something I initially thought I couldn’t possibly pull off. When I told her I wanted to be an author, she didn’t simply encourage me to try writing a book; she made an entire class project out of it. Miss Cohen asked each student to volunteer a task: research, illustrations, arrangement and labeling of figures, cover design, sectioning and title making, indexing — even book binding. I would be the lyricist.

The book’s title was The Queen’s Dilemma, the story of a ruler who leaves the castle because she’s overworked and underappreciated. She undergoes a series of travails: wandering in the forest, meeting strange people, encountering wild animals, and nearly starving to death. Finally she meets her prince charming, who awakens her with a kiss while she’s fast asleep under a tree. I pirated the story line out of a combination of Cinderella and Snow White, minus the Seven Dwarfs. Now that I think about it, my mother, a beleaguered homemaker who also worked full-time, was likely the archetype of my lead character.

All the kids in Room 2 got excited when it came time for the class to work on joint projects. Less constrained than today’s teachers by curricular mandates, Miss Cohen would set aside the hour following lunch break for student collaboration. Every step of the way, she’d make sure we were all aware of how every facet of the process of creating a work of literature needed to be carefully coordinated. The sentences in our book needed to be grammatically correct, the printing squared off and tidy. All the illustrations had to be placed at the correct positions in the text for the story to make sense. There were endless production questions: Would the queen really wear an outfit like that when she was running through the forest? How much glue do you need to add to the binding to make the book strong enough to resist repeated openings and closings? Are you sure you worked out the price of the book to cover the cost of all the materials and still make a reasonable profit? Sarah Cohen had a knack for knowing when to loosen the tether and when to give it a gentle tug to help guide her young charges along the path of learning by doing.

The Queen’s Dilemma took about three weeks to complete, from ruling the lines on the page that would frame the inch-high pencil print to the binding process, done in decorative wallpaper glued to heavy cardboard. I got to keep the finished product, and I cherish its tattered pages to this day. My mother loved to trot it out when she bragged, all too frequently, about her son’s first book, written at the age of seven.

Sarah Cohen was a daring experimentalist who ventured far beyond rote teaching and curricular norms. Every time I come across The Queen’s Dilemma in our family memorabilia box, it reminds me of the care I must give and the confidence I must try to instill in my own students, incentives reinforced in Miss Cohen’s neighborhood school classroom. I regret that I missed the opportunity to thank her in person for all she gave me.

Dreams of Skywatching

My moment of revelation about the wonders of the universe began when I was eight years old. It happened as I lay half awake, sprawled face-up in the back seat of my father’s ’38 Dodge. We were returning, as we did late on most summer Sunday nights, from visiting my mother’s family in the nearby town of Ansonia. Looking almost straight up out of the sharply angled rear window, I noticed the way the stars reflected the car’s turning motion by rotating in the opposite direction. A band of faint light that stretched all the way across the sky caught my eye. Like the stars around it, the luminous streak kept shifting direction with each turn, first parallel, then perpendicular to the back window.

When we pulled into the driveway, I distinctly remember opening the car’s heavy rear door and stepping out into the cool night air, the silence broken only by chirping crickets. I looked up and my mouth opened wide as I beheld the black night sky blanketed by dazzling starlight. There was that milky white band in the sky that ran from the top of the garage straight up overhead and disappeared behind the roof of the house. I could make it move all by myself just by rotating my body. What was that fuzzy luminescence? And where did all those stars that blanketed the rest of the sky come from? There must have been millions, billions, zillions of them, I thought. What were they? How far away? In his chapter on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote: “When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe … Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?”

That late summer night was the first time in my life I recall feeling the emotional state of excitement we call passion. It was an almost breathless feeling, and it nearly brought me to tears. I became consumed with an overwhelming desire to find out as much as I could about the stunning spectacle I’d just witnessed. When I told Miss Cohen about it, she explained that the band of light that enthralled my soul was known as the Milky Way — the edge of the galaxy we live in, part of an even bigger universe made up of billions of galaxies. How big was it? “You need to go and find out,” she said, pointing me toward Dewey Decimal Section number 523 of the Truman Street School Library. There were only three or four astronomy books among the minuscule holdings in the humble neighborhood cache of knowledge, scarcely enough to satisfy the immediate needs of my curiosity. But the vast collection at the City of New Haven Public Library, just a nickel ride downtown on the Washington Avenue streetcar, held the potential to temporarily quench and then further accelerate my desire to answer a flood of questions that popped into my head: Where did the stars come from? What makes them shine? Why do they have different colors? How come some are bright and others are scarcely visible? I spent hours in the reading room after school pouring over Camille Flammarion’s detailed illustrations of the Milky Way in his thick Dreams of an Astronomer. I fantasized over the imaginative drawings of what life in a space station might be like in Willy Ley’s Conquest of Space. I rummaged through the entries in the Catalog of Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes by the pioneer celestial photographer Edward Emerson Barnard. I copied notes, drew charts, even made my own star catalog. Over the next four years I managed to save up seventy-five dollars of allowance money to buy my own telescope. What a feeling of excitement, this opening of the mind, this newly acquired capacity to pursue on my own the truths about a world I’d never encountered before.

I acquired great joy in collecting information about the vast extent of the creation of the universe in space and time. I learned that the span of existence of our entire human family, from cave dweller to ancient pyramid builder to me and all of my lived activities, was as small in comparison to the age of the universe as was the thickness of the coat of gold paint on the dome of the New Haven Public Library compared to the height of the building itself. I found joy too in understanding how astronomers had come to know that it would take more than a human lifetime to travel to the nearest star in the space vehicles Ley promised would one day take us to the moon.

My zeal for acquiring information was soon accompanied, for reasons I can’t explain, by a deep desire to share my knowledge with my friends. My teaching career began at age eleven in an abandoned coal bin in the shared basement of a second-story coldwater flat my mother, father, younger brother, and I rented in a two-family house in East Haven, Connecticut. The coal bin, an 8-ft. Ã — 10-ft. wood-slatted chamber, open at the front, lay empty, as most of them did in the early 1950s. By then, postwar American homes were heated largely by oil.

That extinct coal bin would become my classroom, the place where my brain child, the East Haven Astronomy Club, would meet every Tuesday after school. The number of enlightened pals in my neighborhood middle-school class interested in the pursuit of the life of the mind was surprisingly large — maybe 15 percent, which amounted to five or six boys. Today we’d call them “geeks” — still my most cherished classroom treasures. We all pitched in sweeping, cleaning, and decorating the walls with picture cutouts of planets and galaxies from Life and National Geographic magazines. Sitting on makeshift benches, each made of pieces of discarded 8 Ã — 10 boards nailed together, at desks fashioned out of vegetable crates found in the trash bin behind Green’s Neighborhood Market, we crowded into the cozy coal bin — turned-classroom to share our ideas.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Class Not Dismissed by Anthony Aveni. Copyright © 2014 Anthony Aveni. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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