Teaching, sitting, standing

For a long time I fell into the habit when teaching of sitting on the edge of the "teacher's desk" at the front of the classroom. Last semester I decided to make a change -- to honor, in a modest way, the memory of the best teacher I ever had. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was an M.A. student and graduate assistant, Jim Doyle, whom I've written about elsewhere on this blog, asked if I'd like to teach one of his classes (on "Lycidas"). I sat behind a very large and very wooden desk with Douglas Bush's edition of Milton and a cup of coffee and somehow talked about the poem. "It was very good," Jim said afterwards, but he advised me to stand: "Some people do better sitting; some people do better standing. You would do better standing." I can still hear these words as very likely exact. In "Spring" 2006 (that is, January 2006), I started standing while teaching. With the exception of a small seminar, during which I almost always sat, I've been standing while teaching ever since.

Thinking about Jim Doyle's words makes me recall how little useful guidance I received when I began teaching. The only institutional effort to address the graduate assistant's role as instructor came in the form of a workshop about writing instruction that devolved into an arch discussion among professors of what color ink to use when "marking" (that oddly primitive word) papers. One professor's suggestion was to switch colors from paper to paper, to keep students guessing -- a pretty clear indication of how seriously he took this whole business of thinking about how to teach writing. With no clear model of what I was supposed to be doing, I resolved simply to give my students their money's worth and mark their essays as fully as possible. I would mark everything, and thereby really help them with their writing. I cringe when I think of it. My students recognized, at least, my dedication.

Back in the day, I was quite grateful for Jim's plain, pragmatic advice. I'm not sure when I moved away from it and began sitting on desks. That casual-looking posture is less comfortable than it might appear -- getting down to write words on the blackboard (which is still black, not green or white) or reaching across the desk for a supplementary book can be slightly ungainly, the desktop being almost as great an impediment to easy movement as the stools upon which folksingers once perched.

So I'm standing again, with notes (which I only occasionally use) on a lectern and a book in hand, sometimes behind the lectern, sometimes moving around the front of the room. It occurs to me that instead of falling into a habit, I've made my posture when teaching intentional. Standing when I'm teaching makes me think of Jim Doyle -- not a bad idea for anyone who teaches.