This is a guest post by Eric Schliesser, University of Amsterdam
Because my dad resented being shunted into the family business – and disguised his anger at himself for not escaping this fate – he made it very clear that unlike his parents, he was willing to support me in my education ‘whatever I would choose.’ (He had received an Associate degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, but no other higher education.)
My dad had assumed I would be prudent about my freedom, and was aghast when in my mid-twenties I was pursuing a PhD in philosophy partially subsidized by him. I had opted for a PhD because Professor Eichenberg (my Intro to IR teacher) had asked me to teach a number of sections of his intro to IR course. I loved that vastly better than any of the ‘real jobs’ I landed in the early 90s (the so-called ‘jobless recovery’); academia beckoned.
At The University of Chicago even junior PhD students were given the opportunity to teach their own classes in the required undergraduate great books/Humanities sequences. During one winter session in the late 1990s my dad visited my class, and sat in the back of the room. He had no idea what we were talking about, but after class he was beaming, and he said something like ‘you have really found your calling.’ After that frigid morning in Hyde Park, he only spoke with pride about my career choice (and gleefully remained ignorant of the content of most of my work until he died).
Back in those days, we received no teacher training, and I was not an especially good teacher. I have some evidence of that: my dad himself often referred back to the class visit by telling people that apparently I had called on a student by asking “is that your hand or are you scratching yourself?” He thought that genius (and ridiculous). I am sure part of his joy in sharing that story is my obvious discomfort about it. But the other part was the shared joy in my vocation.
At Chicago, and also in my first few temporary jobs, I generally taught students who were obviously much smarter than myself. In these jobs, classroom sizes were small; ‘teaching’ basically involved sitting in a small circle and learning from my students while discussing the reading and facilitating discussion. Yes, there were lots of papers to grade, but basically I was being paid to read books with bright, articulate students.
In reflecting on my graduate and undergraduate teachers – remember I had received no teaching training – I decided that good teachers used an exaggerated feature of their character to connect with their students and, thereby, re-direct their focus to facilitate mutual learning. Plato calls this (more highfalutin-ly) the turning of the soul; Adam Smith (a very successful lecturer), ever so practical, suggests it’s directing vanity to its proper ends. In acting on this insight, I became a classroom character, and my teaching evaluations were polarized. Later I realized that the student-critics had a point: I was teaching to my better students – the ones who would be teaching me – and not to all my students.
So much for introduction. A few years ago, I was disabled and spent almost year in bed with debilitating headaches and general lack of conviction I could ever be professionally active again. (Check out my long covid diaries on this.) I had plenty of time to reflect on my career and the existential choices that had brought me where I was. After discussing it with my occupational physician, and soul searching, I realized that in my job I was passionate about three things: undergraduate teaching, having my research read, and learning from my peers at workshops or conferences. Being denied all three was clarifying. There were also things I enjoyed not strictly part of my job description (like blogging). Things that on refection I really didn’t like: both ends of peer review, administrative tasks, being a PhD supervisor, and a few others.
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