QUARANTINE BROODING

It is fast coming up on sixty-five years since I taught my first class as a Teaching Fellow in the Harvard Philosophy Department in 1955, and I have been thinking, here in self-quarantine, on what has changed and what has not in the teaching game.  Plato is still Plato, Kant is still Kant, Marx is still Marx.  Nor have the students changed very much, although God knows their music has.  And, as I had occasion to remark in an email to a friend the other day, student writing has not changed noticeably either.  Some students get it, some don’t, some write rather clearly, even elegantly, most don’t.  But now that I have substituted a blog for the classroom, there is one huge difference that has very much transformed what I can get away with saying.  To put it simply, everything I blog is preserved forever in the blogosphere.  Why should that matter?  Because it means that I repeat myself at my peril. 

If I am merely commenting on the passing scene, this is not a problem:  different scene, different comments.  But during my half century and more of teaching, I would strive to find striking, original, sometimes poetic ways of explaining an idea, and then, once successful [or so I thought], I would repeat what I had crafted, sometimes word for word, as often as I taught that course.  I worked hard to explain difficult ideas in simple ways, reaching always for what the French call le mot juste.  It gave me great pleasure when I was successful.  Indeed, it was more important to me to capture a complex idea elegantly than it was to persuade.  And once I had found a lovely way to explain an idea, I would use it in five, ten, fifteen courses without any sense that I was repeating myself.  Now, I like to think that I had some success over those fifty years, but no one who is not a Mozart can produce an endless flow of original beautiful phrases. 

These ruminations were provoked in me this morning by something I wanted to say that I thought could be gracefully expressed by an allusion to the 1998 movie The Truman Show.  Some instinct for self-protection in my lizard brain led me to use the search functionality at the top of my blog to check, and sure enough it seems I have used exactly that example four or five times! 

Eventually, I suppose, the classroom will be replaced by zoom, or whatever app replaces it next year.  Professors will be hired to teach a course once, and will receive residuals each time it is re-run.  And when a lecturer passes on to the great emeriti/ae in the sky, the students will, like the viewers of The Truman Show, pick up the remote and ask, “What else is on?”