This post is a bit over two years old, but since I’m giving my final summer school lectures today, it’s worth a reprint on the assumption that relatively few of my current readers remember the original.
Ever since I started teaching, I’ve been convinced that a course needs ‘wrapping up’ at the end of the term. I never liked profs who finished by saying “Well, that’s it, good luck on the final!” I’m convinced that it’s my job as a teacher to tie as many loose ends together as possible, summarize the material, point out the overarching theme of the course, and then exhort the students to apply what they’ve learned — somehow.
I know my students will soon forget most of the facts they’ve memorized. Five years from now, will my ancient history students remember Augustine’s conditions for a just war? Will my modern Europe students remember who was in the Triple Alliance? Will my women’s history students remember the date the Declaration of Sentiments was signed, or who invented the tampon? I suspect most of these facts (if memorized at all in the first place) will rapidly vanish from their memories in the months and years to come.
For example, in my History 1B (Modern Europe) class, the theme all semester long has been “the triumph of the individual.” (For an Anabaptist socialist, it’s an unlikely theme. My heroes ought to be Menno and Marx; instead I tend to rely on Montesquieu and Mill. Go figure.) My course began with Martin Luther nailing up his theses; it ends with the Nuremberg Trials after World War Two. It’s a stretch to tie them together, but I give it a go. I suggest that just as Luther insisted on the primacy of faith (and faith, while a gift from God, is essentially internal and individual), the Nuremberg Trials insisted that men and women were accountable to their individual conscience even over the direct orders of a superior. The Protestant Reformation and Nuremberg are, I argued, both instances where the notion of a universal law, written on the human heart, is used to trump obligations to an external, human authority. It’s a whopping generalization to describe these events in that fashion, but while it’s a stretch, it’s not indefensible. I ask my students to consider this concern for individual rights and individual conscience to be the great legacy of the last five centuries of European history.
In my women’s history class, I’m far more polemical. I tell them that my real purpose in teaching this course has been to raise up young feminists and their pro-feminist allies. I’ve given them a narrative of four centuries of American women’s history to instill gratitude within them for all that their foremothers endured on their behalf. I want them to understand that the right to vote, the right to use birth control, the right to education — all of these were won by women who sacrificed years and years of their lives to the feminist cause. But I don’t just want my students to be grateful! I remind them that the feminist struggle is far from over: in a country without guaranteed maternity leave, where rape and sexual exploitation remain serious problems, where sexual harassment is still widespread and families headed by single women are disproportionately poor, feminism still has relevance. I remind them that how they feel about their bodies — and the bodies of other women — is also a feminist issue. Women have not always suffered from crippling anxiety about their flesh, as my students have learned; one important front in the feminist cause must be to transform individual and collective attitudes towards the body. I urge my students to consider wearing the feminist label (which most of them have heretofore shunned) with pride.
I don’t expect many of my students to really take what I’m saying to heart. I’m far too realistic for that. Most of them are simply here to pass their classes, move on to the next level, and have what they and I hope will be rewarding careers as a result. I wish them well regardless of whether or not they embrace feminism as a philosophy and a cause. Yes, my heart is thrilled whenever I get a note from a student who has changed her major to women’s studies, or has decided on a career in justice work. Part of me suspects these students might have chosen these laudable paths without me or my class; it’s dangerous for those of us in this profession to over-estimate our own significance. But it’s dangerous to underestimate our influence as well. Even those students who won’t make different decisions academically or professionally as a result of a feminist studies class may still find fruitful, if small ways to apply what it is that they’ve absorbed in these sixteen weeks.
In the end, I’m convinced that good teaching is polemical. In order for me to teach, I have to believe that what I teach has a practical application beyond simply providing students with interesting stories and a general background. Good teaching — and I hope in some way, some of the time, I’m a practitioner of that — is meant to push students in specific directions, not merely towards the “truth” but towards the application of that truth in their own lives. Though that is most true in courses like Women’s History, I’m convinced it is also part and parcel of even general survey classes.