A Life of Learning in the Classroom

For me, one of the continuing pleasures of being a college professor was in the opportunity—year after year, decade after decade—to teach women and men of unquestionable promise. As a faculty member for five years at the City University of New York and thirty-three at Lake Forest College, I derived unending gratification from nurturing my students' advancement as undergraduates and from hearing about their post-baccalaureate successes. Their attainments sustained my investment in the enterprise of learning.

I think of myself as especially fortunate that I could devote much of my teaching career to a residential liberal arts setting. Carl E. Schorske, in reflecting on his earliest teaching at Wesleyan University (less well known than his years at Berkeley and then Princeton). has spoken eloquently of this formative experience: " . . . only a small college could have provided the openness of discourse that made it possible to confront the cultural transformation across the borders of increasingly anonymous disciplines."¹ Likewise, Lauro Martines, in an essay entitled "Large and Little School Teaching," which I have often circled back to since reading it almost thirty years ago, recollected his best moments with undergraduates as a professor at UCLA. They returned him to his heady experiences while teaching at Reed College.² And Carl N. Degler, writing about his youthful years as an assistant professor at Vassar College preceding his long association with Stanford, warmly recalls one of its singular attributes: "it sought . . . to develop its faculty as well as its students."³

As I have contemplated my own experiences in the classroom—bridging my years as student and then as teacher—at first blush I thought my life of learning dated back more than sixty years. It began, so I believed upon early consideration, when I entered Public School No. 1 in Clifton, New Jersey, in 1947. But as I very recently regarded that benchmark, I made a discovery I deem startling: this story line encompasses influences embedded in portions of three different centuries.

Mrs. Meta Wentink, a cherished third-grade teacher, provides the source of one of my earliest schoolboy memories. It is easy enough to deduce that the youthful Meta Merrill, born in rural Connecticut in 1885, commenced her own formal education circa 1890. I surmise that she completed her schooling during the second decade of the twentieth century. Mrs. Wentink inspired me in any number of ways, only one of which I elaborate upon. In a year-long curricular unit drawing upon history and geography, she introduced our class to maps as a consequential source of unending discovery. I vividly recall that Phoenicia was colored lavender on our large wall map of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations.

Much more recently I have taken time to contemplate the influences that might have shaped Mrs. Wentink's own sensibilities about learning. Her teachers, I quickly figured out, lived amid momentous events of the nineteenth century: emancipation, immigration, industrialization, technological ingenuity, multiple wars, and expansion (domestic as well as international). Mrs. Wentink was sixty-five when I first sat in her classroom in 1950. Now I appreciate that I surely was influenced by lessons and strategies that she herself had derived from her own teachers. I imagine that one or more of young Meta Merrill's teachers might have used a map to trace the course of the Atlanta campaign during the Civil War or the westward routes of the then-new transcontinental railway network. In her youth, she undoubtedly witnessed some of the profound changes in the landscapes of American culture.

Mrs. Wentink's inspiring teaching, I recognize from an almost unimaginable temporal distance, furnished me with my most useful impulses for sustained success once I became responsible for my own classroom in 1969. Above all, I pursued the objective of easing the entry of my students into "communities of serious discourse," a concept I have gratefully borrowed from Stephen R. Graubard.⁴ Whether as a neophyte classroom instructor or in my final decade at the lectern or the seminar table, this goal entailed a multiplicity of opportunities. From one class session to the next, I aspired...