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Into the Unknown

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By Max Clio

I assign books that I haven't read.

There, I've said it. Every time I teach a course -- no matter how many times I've taught it before -- I assign new texts, sight unseen.

Sometimes in job interviews, when asked what readings I assign, I divulge that teaching approach, and it's been known to elicit blank stares.

If I were cagier, I suppose, I would keep it to myself. But why should I have to?

If you delve into the literature on teaching, it won't take you long to run across references to different "learning styles." Some students, the education scholars tell us, are visual learners. Some are listeners. Some learn best in groups. Others learn by doing.

Is it a stretch to imagine that different instructors might have different teaching styles? And might it be the case that for some, to have immaculate lesson plans in which every step of the course is mapped out would be nothing short of the kiss of death?

In my discipline -- history -- reading assignments are integral to the curriculum. We want students to come to terms with different types of written sources, primary and secondary, and to weigh their claims. We want students to see works of history not merely as collections of "facts" but as interventions in longstanding conversations to advance new interpretations and analytical insights. We want them to appreciate the craft of history, to recognize and assess historical arguments critically, and to elaborate theses of their own.

Personally I find that I bring far more enthusiasm to that process when the book at hand is as fresh to me as to my students. I love to enter the classroom with synapses still crackling from what I read that morning. From time to time, I have tried to teach books I've already read, but to me, it's like nibbling on a stale crust. I prefer my bread fresh.

Why, then, those blank stares in job interviews?

Perhaps others think it irresponsible to foist a text on an unsuspecting audience without first determining, with certitude, that the text is worthy of the audience's time. Perhaps others suspect that only haphazard instructors who don't really care about teaching would assign what they have never read.

Those who hold such assumptions ought to reconsider. The prejudice is unfair, just as it would be wrong for me to disapprove of every teacher who favors detailed preparation on the presumption that it drains the class experience of every last flash of spontaneity.

In my case, I have no doubt that assigning books I haven't read makes my teaching better. It ensures that even though I teach the same courses year after year, I return to the classroom eager and alive. It compels me to read widely in scholarship outside of my specialty, providing cumulative knowledge that makes me a better teacher.

But how do I know which books to assign?

A fair question. First, I look to long-recognized classics in the field that, for one reason or another, I simply haven't gotten around to reading. In various upper-level seminars, for example, I recently assigned Leon Fink's Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (University of Illinois Press, 1985), Thomas J. McCormick's China Market: America's Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901 (Quadrangle Books, 1967), and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), all still in print. Caputo's book, in particular, was sublime.

For the introductory surveys, each year brings new offerings from Bedford/St. Martin's, whose collections of primary documents students find accessible. I'm speaking of works like The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices From Early America (1994), edited by Colin G. Calloway, or repackaged American classics like Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, with new introductions by the likes of Louis P. Masur.

Most of the books I assign, however, are recent scholarly books with a buzz about them.

These I discover in various ways. I note reviews by writers whose judgment I trust. I thumb through publishers' catalogs. I scan the ads in the New York Review of Books. I check out the promotional blurbs -- who wrote them and with what degree of enthusiasm. I register the publisher, especially one whose editorial quality is impeccable (Hill and Wang, Princeton, University of North Carolina). I observe what books have won awards.

Within the past few years, I've assigned, in that category, books as varied as Camilla Townsend's Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (Hill and Wang, 2004), John D'Emilio's Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press, 2003), and Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt, 2004), the last of which is a stunning narrative that kept me and my students in awe at every class session.

Sometimes I'm a little late in following up on the buzz. It took me seven years to get around to assigning -- and thus reading -- a book that won multiple prizes, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). It was well worth the wait.

Sometimes, after a particularly engaging class, I write the author a note, telling him or her how much my students and I enjoyed the book. I did so after teaching Timothy B. Tyson's Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), for example, as well as Eric Rauchway's Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (2003). Those books were astonishing for their narrative power and analytical force, and a blast to discuss in class, where I use the blackboard to chart complex arguments and get students to identify a book's key elements.

Students found all of those cutting-edge books informative, well crafted, and intriguing. They generated illuminating discussions.

And here is the crux: The conversations might not have not gone so well had I read each work months beforehand to see if it was suitable for adoption.

I will admit: Not every book I have picked has been a smash. In my colloquium on the 1960s in world history, taught annually, I've managed to pick several works of African or Asian history that were as dull as can be. But such works are as teachable as well-crafted ones. How, I ask the students, could some other historian take the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the life of Amilcar Cabral, the anti-colonial African revolutionary, and make it into a scintillating work of history, rather than the tiresome book we just endured? From that exercise, students take away as much as if I had cherry-picked only the finest works of history. Articulating why a book is bad is just as useful, pedagogically, as explaining why a stirring work of history is well executed.

So next time I mention that I assign readings I have not read, don't think me cavalier or irresponsible.

And I, in turn, promise not to think of those of you who would never be caught doing any such thing as stuffed shirts.

Max Clio is the pseudonym of a historian at a Big Ten university. For an archive of his previous columns, click here.