Come to the Table

So apparently, being on vacation is not conducive to keeping up with the blog. I went home for the Fourth of July, saw family, and completely neglected my blog. But now I'm back at home, at work, and I thought it was time to pick What the Best College Teachers Do back up again. I'm in Chapter 4 now, in which Bain describes the kind of confidence that really good teachers have in their students.

According to Bain, to have confidence in students, teachers give them the chance to do authentic, enjoyable work, and they give them control over the coursework.

Then he offers this passage, which I found compelling enough to merit a blog post:

Susan Wiltshire, a classics professor at Vanderbilt, captured a sentiment we heard often. Her classes, she explained, were in her view like a great meal she had prepared, and she simply wished to invite her students to the dinner table. While others might confront students with the grit of a drill sergeant or as if they were challenging them to a duel, the best teachers offered biscuits and grits for every class (79).

Reading this, thinking of the course prepared by a teacher as a banquet prepared by an experienced chef, I found myself thinking of George Herbert's poem, "Love III." There, Christ (the greatest Teacher of all) is likewise compared to a chef, laying out his very best and inviting his children to the feast:

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything. 

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?" 

"Truth, Lord, but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.

Put very simply indeed, this poem is about Christ's confidence in us: that we are worthy to taste the spiritual riches he has prepared for us, that we will enjoy them once we taste them. In reflecting on Christ's interactions with his guest, I think that we teachers can learn something about how best to motivate students to succeed (and even enjoy!) our courses by expressing confidence in them. I want to make four points about how we teachers can show confidence in our students.

The first is this: True confidence is not false confidence. We tell students they can achieve great things, but we must not hide our eyes to their real academic or even intellectual difficulties. At the beginning of the poem, Herbert acknowledges that he is "guilty of dust and sin": a description which, stated clearly upfront, is guaranteed to catch readers' attention. Before Herbert can "sit and eat" the feast prepared, it is important for him to be honest about what might keep him from full enjoyment of that feast. Moreover, this statement is never contradicted by Love, though he eagerly counteracts some of Herbert's other disparaging statements. In other words, real concerns about student ability must not be simply swept under the rug, they must be acknowledged openly and dealt with.

My personal teaching experience bears this out. When I was teaching in Prague, I paired one of my brightest students with one who was struggling the most. Thanks to the efforts of the bright student, they received a very high grade on a project. The struggling student, rather than being buoyed up by the high grade, was discouraged. Why? Because she knew that she had done little to deserve that grade. Sweeping that student's difficulties under the "rug" of a good group grade did absolutely nothing to overcome those difficulties. Had I acknowledged her struggles more openly,  allowed her to work through them, she may have gained more confidence.

Yet if we are open about the difficulties which students face, we must not make too much of them. Yes, Herbert's statement that he is "guilty of dust and sin" goes unchallenged by Love, but that is mainly because Love makes very little of it. Love says nothing about Herbert's "guilt and sin," only asks whether he "lack[s] anything," implying that if anything is needed, Love will supply it, or at least help Herbert to achieve it. In other words, the main concern of Love is not Herbert's flaws, it is what Love can do to assist and buoy Herbert up. Applied to teaching, Love's attitude suggests that though we as teachers need to be honest about our students difficulties, we should not dwell on these difficulties but on how students can be helped to overcome them. 

This too is something my own teaching bears out. When I was first teaching, I assumed that any flaws in my students' writing were the result of my students not trying, or just being poor writers. Only much later did I realize that since it was my responsibility to teach students to learn, then it was my responsibility to give students whatever resources or encouragement they needed to succeed. Only by turning our attention from students' academic flaws, to how we can help them overcome those flaws, can we actually help them improve in our courses, and enjoy them.

If we focus on helping students improve, we must not take credit for their success. This is the third point I see in "Love III": When we express confidence in our students, we must be clear that the confidence lies in their innate ability to perform well, however underdeveloped that ability is at present. According to Herbert, the reason he cannot enjoy the banquet is that he "cannot look" on his host; he has sight, but he has "marred" it. Love does not quarrel with this statement, only asks, "Who made the eyes but I?" Theologically of course, that Love gave Herbert the eyesight necessary to look at his host and enjoy the banquet depicts the intervention of divine grace in our lives, enabling us to enjoy the spiritual riches prepared. But this is not what I am concerned with now. As a teacher, I notice that the very thing Herbert needs to enjoy the banquet is something which Love says is already in his possession: good eyesight. Are they damaged? Yes, but at least he has them. The same applies to our students: True, their academic "eyesight" may be less than perfect. But just as Love insists that Herbert has eyes, and that those eyes can be made better, we as teachers should insist that our students have the innate ability to perform well in our classes, and that their ability can be improved, strengthened until they are accomplishing far more, perhaps, than they thought possible.

Attribution here.

Last of all, we must remember not only to have confidence in our students' ability to perform well in our classes but also what we are asking them to perform. This hearkens back to the quotation which inspired this post: Good teachers, as Susan Wiltshire points out, are not drill sergeants, and they do not invite their students to a duel. They invite their students to a feast, with "biscuits and grits" (I love biscuits with good homemade strawberry jam. Yum.)

This is ultimately the point that reminded me of Love III, for this is what Love invites Herbert to: not a courtroom, not an interview, not a death march, but a feast. There Herbert is to "sit and eat," the verb sit indicating that this is not a hurried meal but one to be taken at leisure, thoroughly enjoyed. This is what we must do for our students: make our courses, not necessarily "fun", but thoroughly enjoyable, something worthwhile. 

This is not to say that the course cannot be hard. Yet even the very hardest things we do are done for some pleasure we hope to gain. The Apostle Paul writes, that when runners race, "they go into strict training to get a crown" (I Cor. 9.25). Is the strict training fun? No, not really; rarely are things simultaneously "strict" and "pleasurable". But the crown is pleasurable enough. I recently ran a marathon, and while three-hour, 18-mile Saturday morning training runs are just not that fun, the delights of crossing the finish line are wholly worth it.
What we must convince our students of, then, is that though they may work hard, and not have fun, in our course, the banquet which is spread for them at the end of it is worth whatever the effort they put in.

Within the next few weeks, I'll start to plan my courses for next fall. As I do, I want to ask myself this question: In what ways can I help students overcome their flaws and realize their innate ability, in order that they may reap the pleasures of writing and literature?