Slick Willy needs to be reminded that a class is not a Ph.D. oral defense—few students, if any, care about his radical new academic reading of The Republic, or his pontificating on the meaningless, petty aspects of the text. Students register for this class expecting to get a reasonably thorough understanding of early and important works of political philosophy. Instead, they get windy explanations on pedantic and arcane (and supremely uninteresting) details from the text. Roberts is undeniably a bright and articulate guy, but he's stuck in graduate school pretensions. If this continues, Roberts will become the epitome of McGill's worst (but all too often typical)—professors who are stuck in their own academic world, who care nothing about students or teaching.Of course, I would like to protest. That's not me. It's laughably wrong. Etc. And yet...
There is no denying that moving from Washington & Jefferson College to McGill University intimidated the hell out of me. My new colleagues intimidated me, but the students intimidated me even more. Or, at least, I felt on display before them, pinned and mounted in the market of their affections. And the bigger of my two classes was, by far, the worst in this regard. And I taught it from the position of my fear: I prepared endlessly, I tried to impress them with my erudition, I tried to make myself feel necessary. So, in that sense, this student is right: I approached class as if it were a Ph.D. oral defense. Or at least, as if I needed to defend myself.
I would like to think I got past that over the course of last term. It certainly was not a monotonous feature of even the Greek political theory course (and my smaller course, on 19th Century theory was radically different, and much more successful). But there was too much of it, for sure. So, I'm sorry for that, my anonymous hater.
This term, the scariest class for me is Aristotle, but not because of the students, per se. It is more the specter of the multiple Aristotle scholars in the Philosophy Department, who are not looking over my shoulder at all, but who inhabit my brain anyway, like so many super-egos. So far, I think I have handled this fear better; I'm still preparing like a madman, but I told my students on the first day (and again on the second) that I was the least necessary thing in the classroom, and that they didn't need me to explain the text to them. I don't mind being thought of as a tough teacher, a hard grader, or the like. I just don't want to teach from out of my fears.
