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Show boy suffocated by sordid circumstances, reinforced my growing awareness of lifes losers and victims, those unlucky individuals for whom existence is tangled and tragic. I had no natural attraction to the poems of the anthology, though they were of classic quality-Ode on a Grecian Urn, Dover Beach, Gods Grandeur, and so on and I read them only under the duress of an assignment. It was therefore all the greater miracle that during those class hours when Mrs. Birmingham read poems aloud I was elevated. While I listened to her resonant, cadenced voice, my loneliness and worry abated; I forgot myself, existed in a peculiar, unexpected happiness, and at the ringing of the bell awoke incredulously to the ordinary world. I can still sympathize with my aversion to the essays of the anthology. Written for the most part by scholarly writers for scholarly readers, they were ponderous in sentence structure and abstract in diction. Im sure I read most of them cursorily, comprehending precious little and forgetting that all too willingly when Mrs. Birminghams quizzes were past. An example is Arnold Bennetts Seeing Life. This essay extols observation, asserting that events have not been properly observed until the observer links them into broad patterns of cause and effect. I find this essay fatiguing even now. Undoubtedly as a freshman I thought it a diabolical assemblage of numbing irrelevancies. In contrast, a few of the essays, abstract though they were, compelled my attention so totally that I have never forgotten them. One of these is A Free Mans Worship by Bertrand Russell, that splendid late Victorian philosopher who with somber eloquence describes a blank and indifferent universe where all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction. Man must respond, Russell declares, with compassion, reverence, and stoic courage, this being the only victory he can enjoy proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideas have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious Power. I feel yet the cultural shock of my freshman year. Becoming civilized meant distress and dislocation. I had to reset my clock according to geologic time, disan-thropomorphize my universe, recognize the failures of humankind, awaken from comforting dreams. But it also meant, within the confines of human possibility, expanded powers and unguessed at opportunities: the pleasure of learning; the fulfillment of art; the satisfaction of discourse; the exercise of mind and muscle in skilled activities. Obviously I didnt come to all of that through one anthology or through a three quarter course in Freshman English or even through the entirety of a freshman year comprising many instructors and text books, the university library and bookstore, and numerous bull sessions in dormitory halls or at cafeteria tables. But more than any other single book, or any other single course, or any other single year, these gave me a respect for civilization and an ambition to acquire a little of it for myself. Being, as I said, zealous by nature, I would like to convey to my own students a similar respect and ambition. I would like them to grasp the significance of civilization: as a concept, it is the summary of all valuable human activity; as a process, it is the ethical core of all education. Do I therefore teach my own Freshman English course as a surreptitious introduction to civilization or a covert history of great ideas? No, because, for practical as well as moral reasons, any course should adhere closely to its declared subject matter. However, I try to maintain a tactical vigilance for seizing the moment, for striking while the iron is hot, tersely and quickly pointing out connections and indicating broader perspectives. Without compromising instruction in the technical aspects of writing, I find plenty of opportunities to urge upon my students an interest in the life of the mind. The best opportunity exists as I consider with my class assigned readings in our anthology. Although the English Department restlessly selects a new anthology almost every year, each choice predictably features contemporary American life no poetry, no fiction, no documents from intellectual history; rather, brief personal essays and journalistic articles illuminating modern mores and sifting current issues friendship, parent and child relations, notable descriptions of places, episodes of human interest, reminiscences, drugs, premarital sex, disarmament, subliminal advertising, rock music, high tech economy, and so on. I have always been willing to cast my vote in favor of such anthologies. Current issues can be used very nicely to lead students into considerations of civilization at large. The situation I love best is a freewheeling class discussion. Even the technical process by which an essay has been composed can best be appreciated after a spirited impromptu discussion. A tightly structured discussion with carefully wrought questions eliciting predictable student answers is as dull as a lecture. What is needed is flexible, reactive questions arousing students to interest, partisanship, and fervor. It is surprising what students in argument against one another will bring in by way of peripheral knowledge. A tranquil girl may bear personal testimony about an experience with ESP. A young mother may give a first hand account of the problems of single parent families. An aggressive young man may declare that there are no straight lines in space and then may proceed to confuse the class with his homemade explanation of Einsteins theories (no more confusing to me, I confess, than the explanations the experts give). My role is to loiter on the edge while discussion is fecund and students are successfully educating each other; then, when discourse lags or threatens to degenerate into a quarrel, my role is to intervene with a provocative new question or, if the moment is ripe, a teaching question. Perhaps my teaching question will be directed toward the technicalities of writing. What central idea are you evolving for your next theme from this discussion? What specific example have you thought of to illustrate your central idea? Do you see the relationship between taking notes during this discussion and taking notes in the library when preparing a research paper? Or I may seize the moment to ask a more broadening, a more civilizing question. How do researchers prove that smoking contributes to lung cancer? What is the difference between physics and chemistry? Who was Sigmund Freud? What is a cubist painting like? |