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c h a p t e r 1 8 How Harry Taught William A. Oram If the fool were to persist in his folly he would become wise. blake, ‘‘Proverbs of Hell’’ Harry Berger has spent much of his working life in the classroom, and I argue that an account of the way he teaches says something about the way he thinks. Yet I want to preface my description with several caveats. Harry was my undergraduate teacher at the start of his career more than forty years ago, and although I doubt it, his methods may have changed. More probably, my memory of Harry may be skewed. Like other great teachers, he becomes a voice in his students’ minds, a presence and resource one looks to in confronting experience. He is certainly that for me. Yet that interiority, that blurring of the boundaries between the actual person and the voice one has incorporated in one’s own consciousness, means that I sometimes wonder if the actual Harry really said this or that. Was it from him that I first heard ‘‘A dirty mind is a constant joy,’’ an aphorism I’m fond of repeating to my own students? I don’t know. While I think that my account describes what really happened, I may be, like Plato with Socrates, creating a better Berger. Further, the topic of teaching tends to generate ponderous truisms— about intellectual integrity, curiosity, care for the individual student—all true enough but not peculiar to Harry’s teaching. A special pitfall is the impulse to view the teacher as saint. I can attest as much as others to his generosity, his sensitivity, and his extraordinary capacity to listen—really 255 256 How Harry Taught listen—to others. (One by-product of this listening is the characteristic tendency of his criticism to make his work an insistent dialogue with other critics.) But what set his classes apart was the way he went about thinking, a way he encouraged his students to learn. In any case, I don’t want to give Harry a halo. The only halo I associate with him consists of cigar smoke. If a class was going well, he would lean back, light up a panatela, exhale a puff, give his characteristic wise-guy grin, and get on with teaching. Finally, I don’t want to engage in show-and-tell, using Harry to teach lessons about teaching. The Harry I remember was skeptical about classroom technique: I think he felt that good teaching depended primarily on having good material to teach. I argue below that Harry’s classes were governed by a specific theory of teaching and learning, but his methods did not guarantee effectiveness. I first heard Harry when I was a freshman at Yale, when he delivered an evening lecture on the first book of The Faerie Queene to the combined sections of ‘‘Directed Studies,’’ a first-year honors unit. These lectures were supposed to run for fifty minutes, but Harry continued for an hour and a half. After the first hour, I noticed several of my classmates using the anonymity of the dim lecture hall to absent themselves. When Harry had finished, I couldn’t remember what he had said—I felt it was complicated and confusing but I had no idea how to make sense of it. I return to this incident below, but I want to use it here to stress that Harry’s technique was not always a model for others to follow. Nevertheless, while I’ve been lucky in my teachers, many of whom were very good and several of whom were extraordinary, Harry was simply the best—the teacher who most changed my understanding of literature and of other things as well. Here I’d like to suggest how his teaching differed from that of his contemporaries and became such a continuing irritant and resource. I argue that the way Harry teaches arises from a self-conscious belief that learning consists primarily of imitation, of learning how to think as your teachers think, so that one can internalize their tools and their way of seeing the world—so as to adapt them in turn for one’s own purposes. It’s a vision of learning with its roots in Renaissance imitatio. You imitate the masters in order to take what they have to offer and reshape it for your own project—Renaissance writers often compared the process to that of a bee making honey...

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