For essentially my entire academic career, teaching has taken a second place to research/writing/publishing. Originally this was due to my immaturity, back in the days when I idolized my famous professors and dreamt of joining their ranks as an international celebrity academic. They seemed to treat teaching as a minor distraction to the truly important work of their minds, and I followed their lead.

More recently, my focus on R/W/P has been driven by necessity and abject fear. Tenure hangs over my head like a knife and, despite some pretty words about the importance of teaching, everyone knows that tenure at MidState U. is determined by one’s publishing record. (Here, at my second tier state university, we are expected to publish a book, despite our high teaching load, low pay, minimal support for travel or research, and no sabbaticals. It’s a familiar story, filed under “mission creep”.)

This isn’t to say that I have completely neglected my teaching: my classes are generally successful, I get positive teaching evaluations (despite this recent incident), and I think I do a pretty good job overall. I teach dialogically, use group work, integrate multi-media, and other minor “tricks of the trade.” But I am aware of the fact that I get by on my enthusiasm in the classroom, with very little planning or thoughtfulness or “craft” to my teaching.

I have recently turned a corner in my academic career, with the completion of Major Academic Project and numerous smaller publications, that has made me feel like I have a handle on the R/W/P part of my job. I’m no celebrity academic but I’m doing okay. So, for the first time, I feel like I can begin to think about my teaching in a critical way. It is a shocking fact that someone could teach for as long as I have (well over a decade) without any pedagogical training, but that’s the reality of the profession for most of us. I think about the fact that, if I get tenure, I get to decide for myself whether to pursue R/W/P (rather than being driven by whips and chains) but I will always have to teach. So, I’d like to do it well — or, better.

All this by way of a long introduction to a planned series here at The Bitter and the Sweet: reviews of writing about pedagogy. Like any good scholar, I have assigned myself some reading on the practice of teaching, books and articles of strategies, experiences, and advice that may be useful to me and others. (I’m also looking for recommendations for what texts have benefited you as teachers — please leave them in the Comments!)

My first foray into pedagogical writing is Jay Parini’s The Art of Teaching. Parini is a 30 year veteran of academia, a poet and novelist, and sometimes writer for The Chronicle. I tried not to allow the fact that many of the essays in the book were originally published in The Chronicle to color my opinion too drastically (and negatively).

Almost from the beginning, I had a sense that Parini’s advice was not going to be applicable to the realities of my life as an academic. This isn’t his fault, just a fact of the vast gulf between his experiences and mine, shaped by time, gender, and character.

Here’s the point at which said to myself, I cannot relate to this guy at all: In an autobiographical essay on how he came to be a scholar, Parini writes about going to Scotland for a junior year abroad: “I knew precious little about either Scotland or this particular university when I set sail, on a small ocean liner from Genoa, in the autumn of 1968 … the transatlantic crossing … took six or seven days.” A transatlantic ocean liner to Scotland? He spent the days aboard the ship reading Camus and Marx, and writing poems in a spiral notebook, and, once in Scotland, was ushered into a culture of erudition and tea drinking. Who wouldn’t want to be an academic after that?

Here’s another chestnut: Parini remained in Scotland to get his PhD, where he was befriended by a seemingly endless parade of charming, brilliant male academics, all of whom were eager to mentor him. He writes of one of these men, “I often cycled out to his cottage by the North Sea, bearing a rough draft of a poem in my rucksack.” Really? A rucksack? Could it get any more quaint and picturesque?

It’s very easy to dissect Parini’s entrance into academia as an overly romanticized “portrait of the life of the young man as scholar” — although I don’t doubt that it is an accurate portrayal of his experience. What was frustrating to me was how this attitude carried over into his writing about his later life as a teacher in America, facing the same tenure pressures and professional challenges that many of us experience. Even here, there was a tenor of bonhomie that was alienating to this jaded reader.

One of Parini’s main themes is that it is possible to balance teaching and writing if one is very organized and sets time aside every day to devote to one’s writing/research. It is a persuasive argument, especially when one considers Parini’s impressive publishing record; he seems to have made this balance work for him. But, then I arrived at this: “I have gone to a village diner in Middlebury for breakfast at roughly 8:10 almost every morning for several decades. During that hour or so, over coffee and English muffins (with peanut butter), I write poems … I’ve made it known in these parts that I write poetry at this diner in the morning, and my friends (and acquaintances) respect that fact.”

Good grief. I only wish that there was a “village diner” in my industrial city, that I could arrange my life to be there at 8:10 every morning, that I could afford to pay for coffee and English muffins for breakfast every morning, that my “friends” would respect my privacy and leave me to write. Again, I don’t think Parini is being disingenuous — I think this really is his routine and that it’s worked out well for him — but it’s completely alien to me.

I also couldn’t help wonder about his wife and three sons: where are they every morning when he’s at the diner? Parini barely mentions his family and doesn’t acknowledge that the balance between teaching and writing must, for many and especially for women, also be balanced against family obligations. I picture his wife feeding and dressing the sons while Parini drinks his coffee and drafts poems. Maybe that’s unfair but Parini doesn’t do anything to dispel the image.

I could go on and on: his withering description of a female academic that ends with “I was not surprised to hear that she died unmarried”; his cavalier account of how he sometimes teases students about their “clothing or hairstyle or whatever,” a practice which “make[s] them feel closer to you”; or how “My family never bats an eyelash when a student turns up for dinner … Students borrow my car, come fishing with me, pick up my children at school when I can’t do it. I treat them as part of my extended family.” The first comment is conspicuously sexist but the others seem equally characterized an oblivious maleness. I cannot imagine a female academic allowing a student to pick up her children — although she may be more in need of such a service than a man.

There are many admirable things about Parini’s version of the teaching life: his commitment to politics in the classroom, the value his places on collegiality, his honesty about tenure, the emphasis he places on the performativity of teaching, and his palpable enthusiasm for literature and his students. Yet, overall I found Parini’s “art of teaching” heavy on the “art” — a kind of fuzzy watercolor painting in which all the hard edges of academia are blurred.