The Sage on the Stage

On Monday, I gave the opening lecture of the semester in an honors course in which I am team teaching with 11 other professors. (I give the first and last lectures and conduct two discussion groups; my colleagues give the rest of the lectures and conduct their own two discussion groups.) Although it was a lecture on a subject near and dear to my heart, and one I know very well (Leonardo’s invention of indeterminacy in painting and drawing), and although I’d written and rewritten this particular lecture until I was quite pleased with the way it sounded, I was nervous. Even after I’d practiced it three times (making sure my words flowed nicely with the projected images), the night before, I was a little nervous.

Actually, I was a semi-wreck and falling asleep was next to impossible. I hadn’t lectured to a large audience of students in a long time. I tossed and turned and my head flopped around on my pillow. What if I tripped on my way to the podium? What if my opening joke brought no laughs? What if I dropped my lecture notes midway through the lecture and they scattered all over the stage? What if I broke my glasses, or my Mac froze up just when I wanted to show the image of Leonardo’s drawing of a rearing horse? What if I flat-out fainted and collapsed and had to be carried out on a gurney?

Delivering a good lecture requires the same qualities possessed by a good thespian. You need bravado and stage presence; otherwise, no matter how good the content of the lecture, it will fall flatter than a pancake. To lecture well requires thinking ahead of time about your appearance — unless you’re a genius, a bad hair day can distract the audience from what you’re saying.

I’m the type of lecturer whose nerves are all atremble ahead of time, pretty much up to the moment I am introduced. But gimme those dimmed lights, and boom! I come alive. Lecturing, by putting me on the spot, extracts from me spontaneous deviations from my prepared text that better expresses what I meant to say, or even thoughts I never had before a sudden moment of inspiration that comes about only because I’m on stage. For all the various individual styles lecturers have, lecturing always remains partly a performance piece. Just as good actors carry the audience with them while they speak their lines, good lecturers carry the listeners along while they think out loud.

“Education experts” (with pedagogy as subject to change as the fashions of women’s clothing, I find it best to enclose those words in quotation marks) have been attacking the lecture for a long time now. Down with the sage on the stage! Up with the guide on the side! Lectures make students passive, turning them into slugs, we’re told. Lectures put students to sleep, dulling their tender young minds and preventing them from having their own original thoughts. Guides, on the other hand, tiptoe silently alongside their students, nudging them ever so lightly (translation: making sure they don’t fall off the trail entirely) to “discover things on their own.”

I’m sorry, but for all the wonder of a great seminar, the great lecture is an equal wonder. Excellent lecturers have a way of making students long to be alongside them while they are thinking out loud. Moreover, repeatedly listening to lectures trains the ear so that it learns to follow a straight-through narrative.

Nowadays, we spend lots of time arguing and talking back to one another. But with the exception of music, we spend hardly any time listening. (Listening doesn’t seem to come naturally.) The best lecturers leave room for the audience to think on its own, posing more questions than they answer. As for the worst lecturers? Well, the best that can be said for them is that they train us to be polite — no small thing in this mostly rude world.