Last fall I came back to teaching college, after a break of several years. My semester ended just a month or so ago, and another one\u2019s coming up soon, so the classroom\u2019s still on my mind. School and education are everyone\u2019s hot-button issues right now, what with murderous children of all races slaughtering their classmates and students unable to meet their grade requirements controversially either graduating or being held back on every level from kindergarten through doctoral programs. So, from time to time, I think I\u2019ll voice my own thoughts on some of those teaching matters here.<\/p>\n
Toward the end of the 1980s, after teaching the history and criticsm of photography part-time on the college level for almost two decades, I found myself growing increasingly disheartened with the progressive deterioration in the quality of education offered by the university department in which I worked (a major private institution in the New York area), and the concurrent decline in the energies and involvement of its students. My experiences as a doctoral candidate in another division of that university made it plain that the problem was systemic, not just restricted to undergraduate courses or fine-arts programs. My colleagues elsewhere in that institution \u2014 and, indeed, in photography and art programs and other courses of study across the country \u2014 reported similar observations, which, though reassuring in a way, hardly proved cheering.<\/p>\n
To make a long story short, by the spring of 1993 I found myself walking unenthusiastically, even reluctantly, into classrooms full of students who seemed to have no particular reason to be there, and no real desire to be in weekly contact with me. I\u2019d vowed years earlier to stop teaching if ever I felt I had nothing to give, and there I was, dispirited. So I finished out the semester as best I could, made a last futile gesture to provoke the university administration into changing course, and left.<\/p>\n
I found the same conditions everywhere I went during the next four years. I guest-lectured in some classes, and conducted a few workshops here and abroad, both within and without the academic environment. But I didn\u2019t teach a full course anywhere. What I found out was that I missed it, terribly, like the best parts of a failed or exhausted marriage. Teaching lies at the core of just about everything I do professionally, so I have other outlets \u2014 especially my writing \u2014 for some of those urges and energies. But the theater of the classroom offers something unavailable elsewhere, and I wanted to find a role for myself in it once more.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take me long to realize I\u2019d teach again \u2014 one academic year of letting go, to be precise, during which I spent most of my time writing and researching, getting some distance on things. When I came to that understanding, I knew I had to start from scratch \u2014 which, for me, meant looking at my own history as a student, and at the models of teaching I\u2019d absorbed and, perhaps uncritically, reflected in my own practice.<\/p>\n
\u2022<\/p>\n
By my own lights, though my grades were generally better than average, considerably more so in subjects that interested me, I was a lousy student right up through graduate school in the mid-1960s. Fundamentally, though I\u2019d figured out how to get through school, I didn\u2019t know how to learn from other people. This was due more to family-based emotional problems irrelevant here than to any principled commitment to the activity that educator Herbert Kohl calls \u201cnot-learning.\u201d Indeed, I didn\u2019t even know yet how to learn from myself.<\/p>\n
Somehow, in the years between 1967, when I left graduate school, and the late \u201870s, I learned how to learn \u2014 first from myself, then from others \u2014 and began to learn how to pass it along to others of my cohort, how to teach. I began my teaching career, such as it\u2019s been, in 1970, in an adult-education seminar on the criticism of photography at the New School for Social Research in New York City. After that I taught here and there, on one-semester or one-year appointments \u2014 art institute and university (graduate and undergraduate), independent workshop, all the variants \u2014 until I landed at New York University in the late \u201870s, where I taught steadily but (by my own choice) part-time on every level from undergraduate to doctoral until my aforementioned departure in 1993.<\/p>\n
In 1982 I entered a doctoral program there myself and discovered, to my delight, that at the age of 39 I had indeed learned how to learn \u2014 that I could enter any educational context, extract from the faculty and my fellow students everything of use to me (including ideas they didn\u2019t know they had, and others I hadn\u2019t known I needed), and could also return that energy in kind, in ways that furthered the work of my teachers as well as my classmates. Call me a late bloomer, but at least I did blossom.<\/p>\n
During those same years, I also received substantial feedback that told me I\u2019d learned how to teach. How had that happened? I\u2019d never had a single course of formal study in educational methodology. Obviously, then, it had come from independent study, practice, observation of others, and reflection on my own experience \u2014 especially thinking about those who\u2019d taught me, in particular the two teachers I\u2019d truly loved.<\/p>\n
The first was Miss Gloria Salimando: P.S. 41, Greenwich Village, 1954, sixth grade, age 11. She was young compared to the school\u2019s standard complement of intimidating battle-axes (probably in her late 20s), and kind, and soft-voiced, and I thought she was beautiful. I was in love, obviously, puppy love, so I hung on her every word uncritically \u2014 to such an extent that more than forty years later I still overcook what little pork I eat in order to kill those dreadful Trichina worms she drew nestling into our layers of muscle tissue.<\/p>\n
And it took me twenty years to discover that I\u2019d unlearned the habit of crossing my legs because I\u2019d devotedly memorized her schematic of the circulation system, along with her warning about the dire consequences of closing off sections thereof with pressure \u2014 she sketched little trapdoors to illustrate the serious health problems that could result, culminating, if I recall correctly, in gangrene.<\/p>\n
Delightful memories, clearly, but not much to carry into the classroom as a teacher: If you want your students\u2019 love, or need it in order to communicate with them, you\u2019re in deep poop from the git-go.<\/p>\n