Generations & Differeneces, Part 4

The Professional Lecturer Learns His Craft

When I started graduate school in Saint Louis, I was asked to tutor first year students and in the summer to take on some other classes, and when I was married it seemed important also to  teach night classes to increase my salary—which from my National Defence Fellowship went up year by year from $1500 to $1800 to $2200.  Amazingly, in those days I was able to pay rent, food and occasionally go to the movies, and save something for travelling home to New York  two orn three times a year.

Now a few incidents stand out from my first attempts at teaching. 

It might have been on the very first day I walked into a classroom to confront a class of first year students in English.  The room was a science lab, the front desk a stone table with Bunsen burners, sink and spigots, and some unidentified equipment.  There was also a high metal stool.  Though I began my introduction to the twenty-odd students in this room by standing in front of the long blackboard and writing my name and other information on it in very powdery chalk, at some point I found myself seated on the tall chair, perched very precariously above the ground, my feet unable to touch the floor.  As the hour reached its conclusion, I realized that there was no dignified way to get down from my high seat and thus remained in this posture as the young men and women slowly, agonizingly slowly, left the room.  Then one or two walked forward and started to ask me questions, at the same time as I could see the next class beginning to enter the room.  The questions went on and on, and my anxiety and embarrassment grew, until I finally had to take the plunge—literally—and leap off the stool.  A noisy and indecorous descent, to be sure.  Who can remember now whether there were any comments, titters or rumors consequent upon this initial foray into the art of education.

Another incident happened in a night school class.  By this time, though growing used to the give and take of talking to students and careful to avoid strange seated or standing positions, I was nonetheless taken aback by what transpired.  Amongst the students there were many adults, men and women much older than myself—I was probably twenty-two at the time, and they would have been in their thirties and forties: an awkward position, though not in a physical sense.  This situation made me nervous.  Then I noticed something even more strange.  One of the adult students was a man in military uniform.  In a flash, my mind reverted to the really awkward and foolish days in my undergraduate days when I was forced to take ROTC classes and behaved in a most unseemly way—asking stupid and provocative questions, letting the instructors know that my respect for them was nil and even politically hostile, and being a little nuisance if there ever was one, while assuming I was engaged in an idealistic quest for peace and harmony in the world.  At this stage in my career, a few steps towards maturity and therefore of tolerance, and therefore further of embarrassment at what I had done had begun to make themselves present in my consciousness.  So when the officer, whose rank was clearly evident in the bars on his shoulders and the cap he held under his arm, approached, I had the double fear of what was likely to happen, since he was both many years older than I was and having the bearing of someone who might take revenge for all the shenanigans played against the US Army less than four years earlier.  Then when he was standing in front of me, he seemed to snap to attention and look at me intently, saying, “Sir, may I ask you a question concerning the syllabus?”  He called me SIR and I wanted to turn around to see if he actually were speaking to someone else.  He was showing me respect and I could not believe it.  Somehow God knows how I managed to keep from following or stammering and answered his question with all the calmness I could muster, though deep within my whole body was shaking, my stomach rippling and my bowels about to explode.

One more little memory from those days.  At examinations time, the graduate assistants were called upon to invigilate in other departments as part of our job description (though such an expression did not yet exist).  Therefore I found myself in a very large room full of engineering majors all seated in rows of benches and long desks and given the assignment to tell them when to begin writing and then later when to stop, and from time to time, usually on the quarter hour, to write the time on the blackboard.  In between, it was my duty as an invigilator yp invigilate, in other words, to walk slowly and deliberately up and down the aisles and observe the engineers to make sure that no one was cheating and to be prepared should anyone raise a hand to listen to their questions and allow them to go out to the toilet if necessary.  This seemed at once a heavy responsibility and a huge bore since the examination would carry oin for three hours.  The test began, and my duties began, and I so I walked slowly up one aisle and down another, weaving back and forth, trying to time my steps so that I would complete one set of invigilating rounds in time to write the new passage of time on the blackboard.  The room was full of at least one hundred and fifty students, all but perhaps five or six male, the few females appropriately dressed in garments that excited no interest in me.  But there was one young man seated about three-quarters of the way towards the back of the room who kept drawing my attention.  In all ways he looked everyone else in the examination room, except that his left hand lacked a hand.  He had a right arm which extended to his hand and his hand had five fingers.  He left arm, however, ended at the wrist, so there was no hand and no fingers.  As he wrote with the right hand, the left arm and the surgically  truncated wrist rested on the paper he was writing on, and occasionally would rise up to rub on his brow.  An hour and a half into the time allotted for the test, as I walked around and around the room in quarter hour units of invigilation, my eyes came back constantly to the handless engineer.  This is called fascination.  Only when someone at the other side of the room, raised his hand and called for my attention with a sound did I return to my proper duties, allowing him to go out for a quick toilet break.  It is very unprofessional to stare at handless people, yet fifty years later the image still sometimes flashed back int