Nobody just walks into a classroom and teaches without some consideration of self-presentation, just as nobody sits down to write a poem, an essay, or a novel without considering its tone and texture, the voice behind the words. Teachers, like writers, need to invent and cultivate a voice that serves their personal needs, their students, and the material at hand. It’s not easy to find this voice, in teaching or in writing, and it helps to have models in mind.
Teachers who are unaware of their teaching personas might get lucky; that is, they might unconsciously adopt and adapt something that actually works in the classroom. But most of the successful teachers whom I’ve known are deeply aware that self-presentation involves the donning of a mask.
This taking on of a mask, or persona (from a Latin word implying that a voice is something discovered by “sounding through” a mask, per/sona), is no simple process. It involves artifice, and the art of teaching is no less complicated than any other art. Yet young college teachers are often tossed into the classroom with little or no preparation for what will be the central professional activity of their lives.
The analogy between writing and teaching seems almost uncannily apt. A writer begins with an impulse to create, then casts about for appropriate forms, ways to “give airy nothings/A local habitation and a name,” as Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When you first begin to write, say, poems, you tend to sound just like your favorite poets; this makes perfect sense, given that you learn to write by imitating good writing. Gradually, the poet’s voice separates from his or her precursors, becomes distinct, although you can almost always tell the lineage of a poet. When I read the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, for instance, I can still hear in every line the harsh, alliterative thrust of the Anglo-Saxon poets, the “sprung” rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the compressed, visionary lyricism of William Butler Yeats. The voice of Heaney has swallowed up, digested, these precursors; but they remain ingredients of his own voice. His originality is a product of the way he has been able to use what went before him to absorb and extend a particular tradition.
The same is true of teaching. You learn to teach by listening closely to your own teachers, by taking on their voices, imitating them, digesting them so that they become part of your own voice. This has been vividly true for me.
I was influenced by several teachers, as were most of us who spent much of a decade preparing for a teaching career. But two teachers in particular “spoke” to me in such a way that I was able to adapt aspects of their personas to my own classroom ends. In a sense, these two professors represent the emotional and stylistic poles of my own teaching, and I still find myself enlivened by the rich memory of their classroom presentations. Some days, I still hear their voices.
The first taught me at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, where I was an undergraduate in the late ‘60s. Jim (as I was allowed to call him only after I graduated) taught Shakespeare and Milton -- the center of the English curriculum. And his teaching spilled over beyond the classroom. I can still recall sitting at his kitchen table into the wee hours, hovering over Milton’s sonnets. Jim could not stop teaching, and I felt immensely privileged to be in his company. It was apparent he cared passionately about what he was doing. Poetry and drama played a huge role in his own emotional and intellectual life. He taught me how to use literature; that is, how to let one’s heart be instructed by a text.
I’ll never forget the day Jim read Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” in class. We were not even studying Wordsworth at the time, but he saw a connection to Milton. We were transported by the way he read aloud. Jim’s vocalization of poetry was a form of Lectio Divina -- or “holy reading.” I suddenly understood that here was the Word made flesh, given voice. I saw for the first time that one of the functions of a literature professor is to embody the voices of the past, to represent them and perform them, showing how a speaking voice breaks against the meter. This reading aloud is, as it were, one of the holy offices of the profession.
Jim didn’t enter a classroom, he swept into it. His eyes were intense, never meeting those of anyone in particular until the class was genuinely under way; he was somehow pregnant with the material at hand, preparing to give birth. We sat up, eager; we knew that what was coming was going to be good. After a brief pause, he would catch someone’s eye. At that moment, everyone in the room felt caught. It was uncanny.
A tall blond man, with longish but neatly combed hair, he conducted the class a bit like a conductor might work an orchestra. He would ask questions that demanded answers, good answers; but the answers were always buried expertly in the questions. Jim knew how to direct our attention to specific lines, and how to make us understand that these lines constituted evidence for a given argument. We were not allowed to get away with easy answers. This was part of the way that he took us seriously. And he did not hesitate to dismiss an ill-considered response as beneath contempt. Fear of that contempt kept us awake.
Jim would mix lectures with discussion in a manner all his own, using a witty remark to cut off a student who was moving along the wrong track, then rising from his desk, pacing back and forth like a caged panther (he seemed to pace in order to think). Then he would halt abruptly, glare at someone, and start to lecture for a bit: always a vivid manifestation of what Emerson called “Man Thinking.”
I learned from watching these manifestations how a cultivated mind confronts a text. I began to comprehend the many layers of association that good reading encourages; to see that a reader must proceed carefully, never putting more interpretation on a symbol than it can legitimately bear. Most important, I also learned that enthusiasm (from the Greek word for madness) is essential to good teaching; a teacher must be transported, even maddened, by a text.
During my junior year abroad, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, I encountered the other great teacher in my life. In 1968, he was a young don, in his late 20s. His sharp features and lean, angular aspect were quintessentially English. He had, I learned, recently come to St. Andrews from postgraduate study at Oxford and had quickly made a name for himself as someone whose lectures were a crucial experience for anyone genuinely interested in literary studies.
I was lucky to get him as my tutor. I went to every lecture he gave, whether or not I was actually enrolled in the course, and I looked forward eagerly to our weekly tutorials, where his sly wit and wry manner struck me as wonderful. I could not get enough of him.
He read each of his lectures word for word from a prepared text -- something I hesitate to do, although at times it does actually seem to work, especially when the material demands a kind of close analysis that is almost impossible to achieve extemporaneously. Whenever I resort to reading a lecture, I imagine myself as my former teacher, and even hear myself adopting certain of his tones and inflections.
In seminars, he was peerless. He gave students immense latitude in putting forward their own interpretations, and he held his big guns (his considerable learning, his intelligence, his wit) in reserve until we had exhausted our own resources. Students tried to match him, and he took great pleasure in their attempts. There was, indeed, a warmly skeptical quality to those seminars that, three decades later, I still try to emulate.
My mentor in Scotland was in some ways the opposite of my mentor at Lafayette. Where my teacher in the United States was brash, outgoing, almost overbearing at times, his counterpart in Scotland was reserved, shy, and hesitant. I later learned that both of these self-presentations were fictions: Each man had developed a persona that worked for him, that allowed him to teach in a way that seemed authentic and that proved highly functional as a rhetorical device -- that is, each got certain reactions from the class as a consequence of his persona. Each of these teachers had forged a distinct voice.
When I began teaching, in the mid-'70s, I was perhaps more uncertain (owing to a natural shyness) than many young teachers, unsure of my own classroom voice. I remember one day, before a class on Milton’s Paradise Lost, actually calling Jim to ask a question about how to present some passage in class, hoping to plunge myself into his sensibility. I wanted to be near his way of thinking about poetry and to absorb his mental energy. He made some suggestions, and as I recall, the class went especially well that day, and I was able to live off that energy for the rest of the term.
But both teachers and writers must be clear about what energy is theirs and what is derived from other sources. Achievement as a writer involves processing different voices, coming to a point where you are aware of your influences and can manage them in such a way that your own authenticity is no longer the issue. In teaching, you must also come to terms with prior voices, mentors, influences; the long evolution of a particular and effective teaching voice is the result of years of trial and error, of periods when you do not feel in possession of a singular voice, of dark moments when you question your ability to teach at all.
Few outside the profession understand the courage that it takes to step into a classroom. It requires a certain bravura, and the deliberate assumption of a mask that, in the early years, especially, may not feel authentic. My guess is that almost all of us who choose this particular path have specific mentors in mind, parallel selves who haunt us in our early years in the classroom, who merge and reappear at various points in our careers. These figures serve as guides, pointing a way that, in the end, we must make our own.
Jay Parini is a professor of English at Middlebury College. His fifth novel, Benjamin’s Crossing, was published in May by Henry Holt and Company.