Thoughts on Walking Into the Past

Two decades ago, we left Kentucky for an Arkansas sojourn, for me to teach in the History Department of a small liberal arts college.

We returned to the Bluegrass after four years away;  we loved the tiny Arkansas school, but we missed terribly the rolling hills of western Kentucky.  If anything, our exile in the pancake-flat, mosquito-ridden delta rice fields of northeastern Arkansas taught me the intimate connection between the past, present, and future, something that any History teacher should already know.

Students—students of History at least—should also know how to make these connections.  What is History?  Why is it important to study History?  How does one study History?  These are questions that I have been wrestling with for some time.  These are questions my students have discussed in our classes this semester.

When we left Kentucky those many years ago for “the land of opportunity,” “the Natural State,” as tourism brochures proclaimed, Ron Watson, a resident of Hopkins County and a very fine poet, himself a native Arkansan, gave to me a farewell poem that made the connections clear in language that a small town boy from a western Kentucky county seat town could understand.  The poet described a father and son experiencing together the eerie sensation of “walking into the past.”

The experience took place in an old general store, no sprawling Walmart mind you, but the sort of place where old gentlemen in overalls gathered in the late afternoon to play dominos around a coal stove:

“It’s Saturday        
and we stop at the Dalton Store            
before putting in on the river.

Oldtimers are holding down a bench that hasn’t changed in 20 years and somebody shot Homer Bailey’s dog          
for running deer is what we hear as the screen door squeaks open and slams shut           
and swallows us into the general store  that is always darker than outside.

A fading red Coke machine           
is defining nostalgia against a wall and kids we might have been are standing on a footrail     
at the counter.

We hope it is black licorice and Moon Pies but they could be buying anything.

We try not to hurry         
and for a moment begin to blend as easy as shade into the slow scene,
to soak up the almost forgotten something          
we once were.

Paid-up, the kids spill toward us in a stream that we divide. 
We turn to watch it reconnect down the dark aisle          
that points like a chute in the cool  dimness toward a door that opens like a tablet of light.”

I have tried to picture a father and his small son standing hand in hand in the middle of the store’s darkened aisle soaking in “the almost forgotten something we once were.”

Standing in the present, the father and son gaze into the darkened interior at “kids we might have been,” standing at a counter buying perhaps “black licorice and Moon Pies,” only to have the representative group from the past “spill toward us in a stream that we divide.”

And even as the past comes hurtling into and through the present, the familial pair “turn to watch it reconnect” into the future, “toward a door that opens like a tablet of light.”

These connections between the past, present, and future also link together an understanding of history and ourselves.   “As far as we’re concerned, there’s no such thing as a dead past,” Kentucky’s Historian Laureate Thomas D. Clark told an interviewer in 2001.  Dr. Clark, who died at 101, knew whereof he spoke.  “You’re part of the past,” he said.  “Everything you do, everything you touch in some way has an intimate association with the past. . . .Even human prejudices are age-old.”

Now, what can we—students, teachers, and newspaper columnists and readers—learn from that?

Teacher’s Journal: Best Guide in England

For the next two weeks, students will line up at my office door for advising conferences.  They seek out guidance, and for better or worse, their assigned college advisor is to be the guide.  It is that time of the semester when Murray State students can pre-register for classes for the Fall, 2011 semester.  Yes, we are already thinking of the Fall semester!  Before students are allowed to register, they must meet with an advisor to chart out their courses.  By last count, I had some twenty advisees.

It is always a daunting task to sit down with a student to chart out courses, to chart out a life.  Some students know from the first day they step foot on our campus what they wish to major in.  Others will change majors multiple times during their undergraduate careers.  This is a crucial time in a student’s life, a time of seeking out one’s life calling.  And here am I, trying to dish out advice to young, impressionable young people.  Here am I, someone who is so often in the dark, trying to help students see the light.

I suppose one of the most frightening things to discover in life is that one’s mentors are less than perfect, even flawed individuals.  Oh, the horror of finding out that a teacher or coach or minister is, after all, human.  We would like to think that those we have trusted to be our guides are everything that we have unreasonably built them up to be.  But then, when the years have diminished that aura of goodness or greatness, that patina of invincibility, we come to find out that even our most trusted guides have struggled with the vagaries and meanness of life just like everyone else.

At the end of his tour of England, and at the end of his book, In Search of England, H. V. Morton encountered near Kenilworth, just northwest of London, “on one of those hot sleepy midsummer afternoons, when the heat throws a haze low over the meadows,” the ruins of Kenilworth Castle.  Upon his approach to “this rambling, chocolate-red ruin” Morton “met an elderly man in a black coat who was saying goodbye to a crowd of American trippers.  He waved his stick in the air and stamped his feet on the ground, and instead of smiling at his vehemence, they appeared to treat him with considerable deference.”  Morton was to learn that the old man served as the official guide to the castle ruins, and that he deserved his reputation as “the best guide in England.”

The old man collected another group of tourists, some of whom, “having no proof as yet of his virtues, laughed behind his back as he waved his dramatic stick.”  Soon, though, it became clear that this tour would be one like no other, for “this old man,” according to Morton, had “soaked himself in Kenilworth.”  “He lives Kenilworth, he loves Kenilworth.”  At one point, Morton wrote, “from the mouth of this extraordinary guide flowed a magnificent oration.  He built up the tattered walls of Kenilworth for us, [and] he took us through the Middle Ages. . . .  There was not a sound now from his flock.”  He seemed to embody the ruins;  he seemed “to our astonished eyes,” Morton recalled, “to be the spirit of the place.”

According to Morton, “it had been a remarkable tour de force.  He left us rather bewildered, rather like children when the story had been told.”  For in one brief hour’s tour, the guide had taught the group “about the long pageant of history that is England, the evil and the good that have marched side by side down the centuries.”  “England!” he finally cried out to the tourists.  “You now stand in the heart of England.  Are you proud of her, of your share in her? . . . I know that I am.”  What a performance!  What a guide!

After the performance, Morton followed the guide back to the gate.  There he was, already waving his stick at the next group preparing to take the tour.  Morton complimented the elderly guide “on the dramatic genius of his address.”  “Ah,” the old man said as he peered out at Morton.  And it was only then that Morton saw that the guide was partially blind.  “I am glad that you feel like that.  I was an actor once . . . but”—and “here he pointed to his eyes”—“my career ended before it began!”  Morton then realized that “the best guide in England” was all but blind, and that it was his failing sight that allowed others to see so well.

Good Teaching Makes Students Hungry for Learning

How can teachers “get through” to students?  How did the influential teachers that taught me in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college get through to me?  What were their devices?  How did they practice the science or the art of teaching?  I discuss these things with my students who are preparing to teach history in high school.  Is teaching a science or an art?  And is it possible, after all, to teach someone how to teach?  We discuss these things.

Just last week I plucked from my bookshelves at home a worn volume, published in 1914.

Nothing but the cutting edge of research for me!  The pragmatic psychologist William James published a series of “talks” he had given in 1892 as public lectures at Harvard.  The author of the influential “The Varieties of Religious Experience” now turned his attention to the topic of teaching in “Talks to Teachers on Psychology:  And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals.”  James applied his understanding of psychology to the art of teaching.

James made it clear where he stood on the question of whether teaching is an art or a science.  “Psychology is a science,” he wrote, “and teaching is an art.”  Furthermore, he stated, “sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.”  Now, I realize I am out of my element here.  My colleagues in the Department of Psychology or over at the College of Education know and teach the literature on teaching and learning.  Still, William James makes a great deal of sense to me when he asserted that “the science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly.”

We teach certain scientific principles in our various disciplines.  For example, in the discipline of history we teach how to collect and analyze data from primary and secondary sources.

In history, we applaud the rigor of scientific analysis.  According to James, science can “help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly;  and to criticize ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.”

James continued, “A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress;  but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to this own genius.  One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently.”

I am not sure that my teachers were all geniuses, but I do know that they had a genius for opening up the world to me.  I am sure they learned how to do that not in a college class such as my Teaching History course.  I am sure, instead, that they learned the art of teaching on the fly, in the classroom and at home as they prepared for each new day.  Or as James put it, “the art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation.”

To know history, or any other discipline, to have a head knowledge of the subject matter is not enough.  The teachers who inspired me knew their history and literature and science and mathematics, to be sure, but they also knew something else.  They knew how to animate the subject.  Or as James put it, teachers “must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us.”

William James spoke from his own experience, but this has been my experience as a student as well.  “In teaching,” James said, “you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach . . . that every other object of attention is banished from his mind;  then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day;  and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.”

I do not remember much of the subject matter that my teachers taught me years ago (although I must have absorbed more than I think), but “to my dying day” I will remember how the women and men who taught me so well worked me up “into such a state of interest” that I was thirsty for more.  I am still trying to quench that thirst.

Spring Break A Mixed Affair For Teachers

I write these words with the prospect of an academic spring break ahead, and as you read this column, students, faculty, and administrators are absorbed in the middle of a week when the usual schedule of classes, office hours, committee meetings, and campus activities is in full force.

Next week, however, these campus activities will be temporarily suspended.

This is not to say that work will be cease, because spring break week often provides needed time and freedom for faculty members and administrators to play catch up, to concentrate on overdue projects or looming deadlines.

Many students, like professors, chairs, deans, vice presidents, and the president, spend spring break week deep in serious work.

Not all students head for the beaches in Florida.  Some students tend to take off early, stretching spring break week to a week-and-a-half or two.

I have been known to maliciously schedule a major examination the last class session just before spring break, to keep my History students on campus a while longer, but some professors postpone examinations and major projects until after the break, as I did this semester.

Imagine all those students at Daytona Beach, brushing sand from the pages of Biology and Calculus and even History textbooks, taking a few minutes from their ruminations every two hours or so to frolic in the surf!

Well . . . maybe not, but diligent students will nonetheless be greeted back on campus with exams, quizzes, and research paper deadlines.

Students in my History of Kentucky class have told me that they plan to conduct research on Kentucky county reports over the break.

There they are, whiling away the hours in museums, libraries, and archives.  Other students are spending spring break away from studies and parties, choosing instead to serve on campus ministries’ mission trips or other volunteering activities.

Still others have gone back home to spend time with families and old high school friends.

For me, spring break week is a mixed affair.  The University’s spring break does not coincide with Cammie Jo’s spring break at Murray High School, so our daughter will continue to hit the books at school with track practice following the school day.

Still, I always look forward to spring break with giddy delight, a week away from the usual routine of classes and committee work.  I have finally realized that my determination to schedule examinations the last class session before spring break will backfire on me, requiring furious grading during a week of supposed peace and tranquility.

Of course, I will pay for it during the last half of the term, but at least spring break will be “grading free.”

“There is no rest for the wicked,” said Russell Jacks in Jan Karon’s Mitford books.  “No rest for the wicked and the righteous don’t need none,” the old sexton would say.

Spring break certainly fails to alleviate all of the burdens of the teaching trade.  Anxieties still remain, and I peck away at my writing projects, long deferred during the hustle and bustle of the semester.

So I work away and try not to think about the rush to come.  After all, “no man ever sank under the burden of the day,” wrote George Macdonald.

“It is when tomorrow’s burden is added to the burden of today, that the weight is more than a man can bear.”

Oh, there is one other problem keeping me from the successful completion of my burden of work.

One’s children can be brutally honest—can’t they?—especially with their parents.

I remarked to my son, rather innocently, that all week I had experienced trouble in preparing my Sunday school lesson.

I try to teach a vibrant, inspiring group of the faithful at my church.

Believe me;  I learn more from these saints each week than they learn from me.  I simply mentioned to Wesley that “the lesson had just not come together” this week.  (I think that’s the way I put it.)

Wesley shot back immediately, “Daddy, there is only one reason for that.”  “And what is that, Wesley?” I asked.  “March Madness!” he replied.

Concerning Scholarly and Creative Activity

Faculty at Murray State University are evaluated each year in three categories:  teaching;  service (in the department, college, university, and community);  and scholarly and creative activity.

Murray State is a teaching university, so teaching always comes first, but professors are also expected to carry a sometimes heavy service load.  And as much as we disparage the use of the dreaded phrase “publish or perish” we are also expected to be involved in scholarly and creative activity, before and after tenure.

In his book “The Pleasures of Academe:  A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education,” my colleague and friend, Professor James Axtell, recently retired from the Department of History of the College of William and Mary, has included a chapter titled “Twenty-five Reasons to Publish.”  Axtell calls for “habitual scholarship” and he argues against what he believes to be a false dichotomy between scholarship and teaching.

For Axtell, “genuine scholarship has a vital role to play in the intellectual life of all institutions of higher education, particularly in research and doctoral universities and in liberal arts colleges and comprehensive universities that have collectively decided to raise the quality of their overall performance.”

As a regional, comprehensive university, Murray State continues to strive to raise the quality of our overall performance.  According to Axtell, scholarly and creative activity must be “an academic habit to be cultivated” because “the process of scholarship is important to the continuing vitality and integrity” of the institution.

I do not have the time or space to discuss all of Axtell’s “Twenty-five Reasons to Publish,” but I can mention a few of the most compelling.  While the teacher’s “status is exclusively local,” the teacher/scholar’s “may be national or international.”  The publishing teacher is able to extend the walls of the classroom to a much wider audience.  Axtell even argues that published books and articles “like progeny of a human sort, are a lease, however small, on immortality.”  Books “are not only tombstones that the authors get to script and carve themselves before death, they often survive well beyond death and remaindering.”  “The nonpublishing professor,” Axtell writes, “takes his hard-won and extensive knowledge to the grave.”

Active teacher/scholars are also able to enrich their teaching within the walls of their classrooms.  University faculty should be “convincing exemplars of the life of learning.”  According to Axtell, students “need to see, through living example, that education is a continuing process.”

While many students will soon forget the details and facts presented in a class, “few will forget the passion with which their professors approached the subject day after day or the inspiration they gave them to think the subject important and worth pursuing.”  To profess, and that is what professors actually do, “is to maintain a continuous search for new knowledge and to teach others not only what one has learned but how to do the research itself.”

For Axtell, “one fact that is always lost in the fractious turf fights between teaching and research is that publication of scholarship in books, articles, and other media is a form of teaching in itself.”  “A well-conceived, well-written, well-distributed book,” Axtell argues, “reaches and therefore teaches far more students than the author’s evanescent lectures will reach in a lifetime.”

Furthermore, “habitual scholarship is the healthiest, most efficient, and most academically acceptable way to prevent the burnout that threatens” every faculty member.

“To avoid mid-career plateauing and late-career depression,” Axtell writes, “professors should have scholarly projects that hold their interest and renew their enthusiasm for their subjects and disciplines.”

For the teacher who learns to practice “habitual scholarship” throughout a career, retirement can bring added joy.  When some professors retire, Axtell concludes, “they often find themselves at loose ends without an audience, the applause and responsiveness of a class, or the daily routine of teaching, however much they may have complained of the `rat race’ during the school year.”  “Habitual scholars, by contrast, make easier transitions because they always have their reading, research, and writing, which, if arteriosclerosis doesn’t set in prematurely, should be as, or better than, the work they produced on the job.”

After all, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who lived to be 88, wrote more histories, “many of them superior to his earlier efforts,” after he retired from Harvard in 1955 than during the tenure of his long teaching career.

I know this column holds little solace for struggling faculty trying to find time to juggle heavy teaching, service, and research agendas, while at the same time having a fulfilling family and social life at home and in the community, but scholarly and creative activity is just part of what is means to be a university teacher.  As Pericles said, “to have acquired knowledge without the talent of imparting it is just as though one had never thought it.”