A Teacher Must Be: Selected Addresses Delivered at The Conference On English Education

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A Teacher Must Be: Selected Addresses Delivered at The Conference On English Education

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A Teacher Must Be

Charlton Laird , University of Nevada

A good teacher of literature resembles a poem at least in this, that however

much he means, mainly he must be. This is not at all to imply that such teachers
cannot or need not be taught. Quite the contrary. But it is to suggest that in part
good teachers must be born, and insofar as they are made they are made best by
developing them, not by providing them with things to say or prompting them
with methods to be applied. If I seem here to be belittling the teaching of teach-
ers, let me abjure any such heresy at once; I am convinced that all good teachers
have been developed, however good the initial teacher material, by good formal
instruction or by intelligent self-discipline, and usually and probably inevitably
by both.
I should perhaps acknowledge at this point that I am aware that the se-
lection of potential teachers of literature is not our subject, and I hope I am
myself enough of an English teacher to recognize the virtue of having a subject
and sticking to it. This one diversion seems to me useful, however, to avoid
misunderstanding, particularly since I shall be talking more about people than
material. Not always do school boards, or administrators, or even the teachers
themselves recognize that good teachers are in part inherently good teachers.
Based upon a witticism, the notion is common that anyone who cannot do can
teach. I trust that you and I know better, and accordingly I shall not argue the
point, although I could, and could also point out that many doers cannot teach
but wish they could. I desire merely to extend this line of thinking and to point
out not only that good teachers are people with distinctive qualities, but that
teachers of literature need particular, unusual, and generally admirable qualities.
This insight into human nature need not surprise us. We are all aware that a good
teacher of doctoral candidates in nuclear physics might not make a good teacher
of preschool morons, and vice versa. We are familiar with the fact that good
students of English may not do well in mathematics or baton twirling, and we
have tended to be a bit apologetic on this account, as though science and
technology, home economics and range management are the only virtues. We
need not belittle ourselves. We may honestly maintain that the qualities which
go to make good teachers of literature are highly admirable virtues, virtues that
not everyone possesses, virtues that may properly be treasured.
Now I come to my point. Good teachers of literature are those who have
great potential as teachers and as specialists in literature, and in whom these
potentialities have been developed. Preparing a teacher of literature, then, is
encouraging such a person to be. The problem in educating a teacher of literature
is not so much providing him with something he should know as it is helping
him to become.
I am aware that in making these pronouncements I am uttering what many

National Council of Teachers of English

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Selected Addresses Delivered at the Conference on English Education ®
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2 TEACHINGTHE TEACHEROF ENGLISH
will consider heresy, but I am so firmly convinced of it that I make no apology.
It is not the philosophy embodied in most departments at the collegiate or at any
other level. A considerable number of teachers and administrators who would
not be able to implement this principle would accept it in the abstract. But I must
now ask what a good teacher of literature should be, and here I anticipate even
less agreement.
First and foremost, I should say, he must be a lover of literature. The initial
objection here may be that not everyone can love literature. This I should im-
mediately acknowledge, just as I would admit that not everyone can love cats,
accounting, or the binomial theorem; but that is just another way of saying that
not everyone should be given the privilege of teaching literature, and to me it is a
great privilege. Within limits, love of literature can be taught; at least students
can be encouraged to develop it. Love of literature usually grows from ex-
perience with literature, from understanding, and from what we rather vaguely
call appreciation. This is not easy to teach. Teaching students the names of
Shakespeare's plays and the birth and death dates of the author is much easier
for both the teacher and the taught than teaching the subtlety and pervading
tragedy of Hamlet True love of literature, like true love of anything, can be
taught only indirectly. The direct approach, "Isn't it beautiful?" is not more likely
to inculcate love of literature than the commensurate question, "Why don't you
be good?" is likely to instil moral virtue. Fortunately, love of art and language
is infectious. It can be taught, to those who are teachable, if we keep firmly
before us the conviction that we are teaching the love of literature, not the
secondary facts about literature. For example, if we are endeavoring to teach
love of literature, very wide reading in literature is likely to do more good than
any amount of reading about literature.
Second, I should say that a good teacher of literature must be able to read.
Here I am thinking of several sorts of reading. Presumably a teacher of literature
should be able to read rapidly in order to read widely, but, even more important,
he must be able to read accurately, with perception and penetration. Many pro-
fessed teachers of literature cannot read at all in this sense; they cannot pene-
trate to what an adult writer is saying overtly, not to mention sensing what a
poet endeavors to reveal. A teacher of literature should be able to read orally,
and the younger the students the more important oral reading is. Most students
at any level can sense literature only if it is read well to them, and this is true
particularly of poetry and drama; but it is also true, although to a lesser degree,
of truly great passages of prose, either fiction or nonfiction. Of course a teacher
can get some help here; we now have many records of modern poets reading
their own works and of skilled interpreters reading the classics. We can scarcely
expect that all English teachers will be able to read Chaucer with ease and
comfort, but if they cannot they had best play records. Chaucer wrote mellif-
luous poetry, and to read him as though he was a labor, even a labor of love, is
scarcely a service to anyone. Teachers can profit from better readers than they
and from readers who have special qualifications for certain sorts of reading, the
reading of plays for example through a number of voices, but all the audio de-
vices in the world will not make a good teacher of literature. He must be some-
A TEACHER MUST BE 3

thing more than the operator of a tape player; he must have learned to read, and
his education should be calculated to help him as a reader.
The good teacher of literature should have had experience with his subject
as a creator. That is, he should have tried to write, and the more different sorts
of writing he has tried the better. I am not here saying that a good teacher of
literature must be a good novelist or poet or playwright. No doubt that would
help, but there are many good teachers who could never be good practicing
literary artists and many good writers who would be bad teachers. But to under-
stand the written word the teacher must understand writing, and to understand
writing he must have faced blank paper and have wrestled with it. Pretty ob-
viously, having children helps women to become good mothers, and every teacher
knows that no number of courses in pedagogy can entirely replace classroom
experience. To know writing one must try to write, however bad the result; every
teacher of literature needs it for his own well-rounded approach to his job. He
needs it, also, because students should attempt creative writing, however inept
the products, and at a minimum a teacher should have seriously tried what he
endeavors to teach.
A good teacher of literature has other skills and virtues, but partly in the
interests of space I shall mention only the most important of these, and relatively
lightly. A good teacher should be able to explicate; he should be literate enough
so that he can help students formulate their own thoughts by joining the students
in the process of clarifying emergent ideas. Thus training in the principles and
practice of criticism is important for teachers of literature, particularly if, in
learning to explicate, the teacher learns to restrain his practice of it. Talking
about literature, even about literary art, should never displace, as it often does,
the experience of literature itself. In a sense which Shakespeare probably never
intended, the play's the thing, and so is the novel or the poem.
The good teacher of literature should be so well informed that he can
branch out from any given work or body of literature to other related pieces.
The knowledge of works as different as James Joyce's Ulysses and the Old Norse
Saga of Burnt Njal can both contribute to the teaching of a short story like
Hemingway's Ten Indians. A teacher of literature should be able, almost
spontaneously, to suggest that there is no end to what Keats called "the realms of
gold," that no matter how far the student goes, good things will always rise before
him.
The teacher of literature should have experienced language, which is at once
his tool and the tool of those who wrote what he professes. Personally, I do not
see how anyone who loves either language or literature can be indifferent to
the other; but, if the teacher does not find language exciting, at least he can know
something about it and be able to use it. He should, for example, be able to write
a paragraph, and too few teachers can. He should have a working knowledge of
at least one foreign language; for these purposes languages closely linked to
English, like French and Latin, have advantages, but tongues that are not even
descended from Indo-European, like Chinese and Menominee, also have their
uses. He should understand the nature and working of language, and for most
teachers this would mean a minimum of one course in historical and one in
4 TEACHINGTHE TEACHEROF ENGLISH
modern linguistics, or commensurate private reading. Of course such insight
should grow almost automatically from a comparison of a foreign language with
one's own, but as foreign languages are at present taught in this country, an
understanding of the nature of language does not usually follow.
A teacher of literature should be sufficiently broad in background and
philosophic in bent to see before and after, both in time and culture. The teacher
should be able to relate literature to the life from which it has sprung, to the
principles of art with which it is instinct. A teacher of literature can never know
enough, but at a minimum he should have a grasp of the major principles of
science and an introduction to the study of man in his environment. Of these last
I should personally say that the most important are anthropology and psy-
chology, although history, philosophy, economics, political science, sociology,
and other studies have their uses as well.
A good teacher should know about literature and be able to employ the
results of literary scholarship and criticism. Knowing something of what the
Romantic Movement was in England helps us penetrate to meaning and sense
the emotion in the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality"- and even in the Lucy
poems - which we might miss otherwise. Knowing that Faulkner raised mules
and that Lamb was a little sprite of a man who stuttered may not be crucial, but
even such details help understand the men and what they did. The facts of
literary history have their uses, even though these uses are secondary in teaching.
The difficulty arises when, extensively in the past and far too commonly today,
the circumstances of literature are confused with literature itself.
In summary, I might observe that being, as I conceive being for the teacher
of literature, is not easy, and cultivating this being is not easy, either; but in my
view the training of teachers of literature should be directed primarily to that
end.