As I heard a clever man say he had once,
For three months, doubted his own existence,
but it was in his youth, before he had rheumatism.
— Sarah Williams, Twilight Hours, 1872
I’ve been teaching for a long time, whether in college classrooms, newspapers, magazines or wherever I might be. Maybe I should say I’ve been learning for a long time, not teaching — learning being my lifelong vocation. I once had a noted professor writing his final book in which he said it was not his last word, only the latest, indicating that though he was retiring, his learning would continue.
Getting out of graduate school with a degree in philosophy, I found no demand for philosophers, so I went to work as a journalist and part-time professor, introducing the subject to unsuspecting community college students.
It was at a community college that a student struggling with the dissolution of her marriage, shrinking funds and two children to feed, asked me what good studying philosophy might be. “Will it feed my children?” she asked. I wanted to respond as only a philosopher might — with a question in response to hers: “Well, not food on the table, perhaps, but food for the mind.” Luckily I stopped myself before speaking and making myself sound like a television commercial, and I waited for her to continue.
Holding the thick textbook for my course, she pointed to it and remarked: “Look at this textbook the college requires us to buy and read. It costs well over $100, and you and I each know I won’t read a quarter of it for this course. Think how much food I might buy for that amount? And I certainly know how much you complain about its cost and bulkiness. So why must I read it just because some department chair requires all philosophy faculty to use this book? How can this person know how students learn when he stopped teaching a few decades ago? I mean, what’s it all about Dr. J? Is it about us learning — or the course requirements of the department?”
I felt saddened by the student’s comments, embarrassed even by the question about the choice of an expensive textbook. I realized that here I was teaching in an inner-city community college where most students had little money or time, and I was following the rule someone else made years ago that every philosophy teacher was required to use the same overpriced textbook. So I asked myself the question I had often used before: What would Socrates do (WWSD)? And the answer was clear — if the expensive book does not help students learn and, in fact, leaves them bored or confused, ask them for feedback.
So I took a radical step: I asked students what they thought about the book and our time together. What I learned from them changed my life and my teaching style. They told me that what they loved and learned in our time together had nothing to do with the textbooks or my lectures but with the opportunities they had to tell their stories, listen to those of other students and learn how to engage in real dialogue. And they related something else that at first made me wonder how I got three graduate degrees and never learned — they valued me most as a coach or mentor in the class, a member of a learning community, in other words.
The truth was that this was the very process probably employed by students in the schools of philosophy in Athens, Greece, many centuries ago. These budding thinkers were not studying philosophy; they were doing it and becoming philosophers in the process. It substantiated my view that my role was to enable others to practice philosophy in a safe and challenging environment, that in this class that met for three hours a week we were re-creating the ancient art of learning how to think by using our own lives as textbooks and each other as tutors.
Rather than being the chief lecturer who poured my information into slits in the backs of their heads to be regurgitated back on final exams, I was one learner among others, just a philosopher-in-the-making, someone trying to make sense out of my life and all the questions which came from living.
From that moment on, I chose to treat philosophy as a practical discipline helping all of us in the classroom community learn more about ourselves, each other, and the great questions that have plagued humankind since first we etched drawings on cave walls. I think I rekindled my love of learning. And I learned what made me a better teacher.
John C. Morgan is an author and educator. This column is from the first chapter of a book he is writing – “What’s It All About Dr. J?” – on what he learned from students over the years about learning and living.
