With summer blossoming and professional obligations on the wane, I finally have the time and inclination to reflect upon my chosen vocation, and think about how I could improve as a teacher. To that end, each summer I try to sample a new entry or two in one of my favorite sub-sub-genres -- the teaching memoir.
A solid entry can renew my tarnished zeal for the classroom; a really excellent one might help me rethink the way I do my job.
I take on such memoirs with high hopes -- I want them to be brilliant and inspiring, and I am rooting for them to succeed from the first page. I lap up the witty stories about the time the writer taught with chocolate smeared on his face, or about the difficult student who comes back years later to credit her success to her teacher.
All of which is to say that when I picked up Dale Salwak's Teaching Life: Letters From a Life in Literature (University of Iowa Press, 2008), I wanted to love it.
I had seen the book advertised at the Modern Language Association convention in December and had been intrigued by the premise. Salwak, a professor of English at Citrus College, in California, had written a teaching memoir/advice book in the form of letters to a student who was killed in a car accident on the way to Salwak's office for a meeting to discuss her career plans. He envisions her following his own path and becoming an English professor, and so his letters to her offer advice on negotiating the challenges of academic life.
In the end, having read the book slowly over the past couple of weeks, I believe that some readers will find this book an inspiring and helpful read -- but the number of them may be smaller than I had hoped, and I can only count myself as one of them with a substantial reservation or two.
I expect that many readers' reactions to the book will depend on how they react to Salwak's narrative persona.
I liked many parts of that persona. He has clearly thought long and hard about teaching, and has come away from it with both an unwavering devotion to his students and a wealth of interesting reflections on the classroom and our place in it. Often his insights come from surprising places or seem to spring from his deep knowledge of a wide range of literary authors and their work.
Citing Ernest Hemingway's famous habit of ending each work day on an unfinished sentence or scene, Salwak suggests we carry the same principle into lecturing in order to generate "a suspenseful finish."
"Conclude with a question toward which the lecture has been building," he advises his former student, "and then say that you'll answer it next time." I have read that advice elsewhere, in more theoretical texts on pedagogy, and I liked the way that Salwak pulled it from his reading in literary biography.
He draws inspiration from the literature itself when he cites four famous lines from T.S. Eliot's poem "Little Gidding":
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
He likens those lines to the way in which knowledge builds in layers for our students. Eventually, we may see more clearly, or see anew, what we believe we have always known. "When we reach the end of anything -- a book, a movie, a class, a life," he writes, "our minds, equipped with a whole compendium of knowledge, insights, and experience, can look back and fully understand the beginning."
That insight also seems to match what I have read in more theoretical literature about the way learning is a recursive, layering process. But rather than citing prolifically the literature on human learning, Salwak seems to arrive at his pedagogical conclusions from his long experience and careful thinking about his own teaching.
Perhaps most endearing of all, Salwak believes in his students and wants them to succeed. His descriptions of his classroom practices paint a picture of a teacher who has devoted his life to learning -- both his own and that of his students.
But in the end, the very feature of the book that first caught my attention -- the premise of letters to a student who might have followed in his footsteps had she lived -- turns out to be the one that got in the way of my appreciating it more deeply. That is especially a problem in the chapters in which he offers advice on research and scholarship.
Salwak has published many books on contemporary British writers, as well as bibliographies and other works of academic interest. And so he envisions his young faculty member deciding to do the same -- to write works of scholarship about contemporary writers.
That gives Salwak a platform on which to reminisce at great length about his interviews and research on British authors such as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Indeed, we get a full listing of what he and Amis had for lunch at their first interview, as well as descriptions of Amis's office, his physical appearance, and so on. We are treated to plentiful quotations from letters between himself and the writers he studied, as well as snippets of dialogue from their conversations.
As it happens, my area of scholarly interest matches Salwak's -- I study and teach postwar British literature. So while I found some of the material interesting, I am guessing that others who come to the book in search of advice on succeeding as a faculty member might not find those details quite so appealing.
And while that might seem like a smallish complaint -- since it concerns only a couple of chapters -- it relates to my larger problem with the book.
Salwak's decision to write letters to a student who would never read them gave him a great deal of license to venture away from the professed subject matter of the book. That license pulls the book too much away from guidance and toward memoir.
"I'm so sorry to hear about the death of your father," Salwak writes to his former student at the beginning of one chapter. What follows, of course, is an entire chapter about the death of his own father. It is a moving and heartfelt narrative -- Salwak writes well, with a strong eye for narrative and descriptive detail.
But in such passages, as well as in his reminiscences about his scholarly adventures, Salwak seems to be hanging as much of his personal memoirs as possible on the epistolary frame, which becomes more and more rickety as the book progresses.
Equally unpleasant to me, at times, are the passages that tended toward the preachy, laying out strangely specific advice as gospel truth. We should honor the time we spend in the classroom, Salwak enjoins his former student, by using seating charts (so as to avoid time taking roll), or by leaving corrected papers and exams out for students 10 minutes before the start of class (so as to avoid the time it takes to hand them back to students).
Those points struck me as the quirky habits of a specific teacher, as opposed to principles that we all should follow in order to demonstrate our commitment to our students.
His advice also veers, at times, into curmudgeonly rants against the ills that television has inflicted upon the lives of our students, or paternalistic injunctions to let the spells of the great writers seize our minds, or clichéd reminders to stay in touch with our "inner self."
An advice book of any kind has the potential to run afoul in two areas: generalizing too much from one's own personal experiences, and sliding from advising into sermonizing. Salwak's book simply slides a little further along in those realms than I am comfortable with as a reader.
But I should conclude by saying that those issues didn't prevent me from finishing the book, enjoying many parts of it, and reaping the reward of a suitably inspiring ending. I came away absolutely convinced that Salwak must be an excellent teacher, imaginative and industrious.
So imagine reading his book to be like taking a course with a great teacher who doesn't honor classroom time with the same integrity as Dale Salwak. You might have to sit through a certain amount of wasted time (taking roll, handing back papers); you might have to endure the occasional tangential spell in class when a passage from a novel reminds the teacher of his childhood, and he spends the rest of the class reminiscing; you might have to listen patiently when he wants to impart life lessons that seem outdated to you.
But if you're willing to cut the teacher some slack, and fidget your way through those moments, you'll come to the end of the course with more inspiration and wisdom than you had when started.
