Center for Teaching & Learning Podcast Transcript

Stanley Rabinowitz’s “Reflections on Teaching”

March 21, 2019
Duration: 00:15:45

[Instrumental music by Walter Kitundu]

JYL:  I am Jyl Gentzler. I'm here with Professor Stanley Rabinowitz who has taught at Amherst College in the Russian Department since 1973. He's here to share with us some of his experiences teaching over the past four decades at the College. In your talk earlier this year, you mentioned your ongoing collaborations with Professor Joe Epstein and you quoted him as saying, “You know, Stanley, I don't teach philosophy, I teach students philosophy.” I wonder whether you might talk a little bit about how you understand that distinction.

 STANLEY:  It sounds obvious and self-evident. But when Joe sort of crystallized it that way, I think, that's really true. And he was very proud of it. This has been his job all of these years. He didn't annunciate that, but getting students to learn philosophy and not starting from the top, but starting from where you are in a room, understanding your constituency. So, I think that's what he meant. And I certainly saw it in action. This was not something, I mean I can do close reading with students and I do, and I could spend a half an hour on a passage, but not the way Joe did. And he kept probing and pressing and forcing students literally to think about what they had just said, well, what, what do you mean by that? And once he started it just kept exfoliating and opening up. I think some students were surprised, intimidated after all, it was a first-year seminar, but it was very useful. And so, I always remember, among other things, he was a kind of a mentor. That particular line from Joe Epstein.

 [00:01:51]

 JYL:  I was struck in your talk about the ways in which you described getting to know each of your students very well so that you could figure out how to teach that particular student, not just students in general, not just undergrads, graduates in general, but this particular student, would you like to say some more about that?

 STANLEY:  My sense has been that, there really is a need for me to understand that just because students have registered for the course and are in this room does not necessarily mean they know why they are taking it. They may be taking it for, I don't know what reason - they heard this, they heard about that. I don't take for granted, the reason why they're there. I try to show them, prove to them, demonstrate to them why it is worth doing this, why it makes sense to go about this exercise and reading and thinking and writing. I think if you come in and just assume that everybody just loves literature or understands it the way you think they do, that could be troublesome. And so once again, this has to do maybe with an overly sensitive, would it be asked me a notion, well, I don't want to ruin this, so I better be careful maybe too cautious, but I really do believe that knowing on different levels who is in there, it changes all the time. It can change from week to week. I think that's part of what we do and I've tried to do it.

 [00:03:36]

JYL:  Okay. Thank you. During your talk, you shared with us, a letter that you received from a former student and it was quite moving. I wonder if you might share a little bit of the letter with us, and talk about why it was that you wanted to share that with your audience.

 STANLEY:  Well, I heard from him after a 20-year hiatus out of the blue, I would not have expected to hear from him ever again. Nor would I have ever expected to get a letter like this. And before I read some of it, I guess the major impact of it is, you'll see, I hope when I read it, was that, once again, not only don't necessarily know who is sitting in front of you, but you don't know what the impact of what you're doing is at that moment. It's a very difficult science. Uh, you might think of this one is going to go off and read Karenina. This is a fellow, and I didn't know that, well, I would not have thought that he could write a letter like this after many years. Talking about how he's now 40, and he has a child and he's facing middle age, and basically is writing to say that some 20 years after being directed by me to do so, he has finally read Anna Karenina.

 [00:05:01]

 STANLEY:  It's a course or it used to be a course with a huge reading list and I had no illusions. There were some people, yes, I was one of them when I was a student and that's where I wound up one who read everything. I don't expect people to read everything and I never fetishize this, the reading list. They read what they wanted to. There were several papers. There was an exam. I did not ask them to produce for me everything. And so here is someone who, like many others, either started Anna Karenina, 800 pages and never finished it or never started it. But, I'll just start with this paragraph. “Is it true that I once lived on that glorious campus and was asked to do a little more than be taken on guided tours of great books by leading scholars? It is almost unfathomable to me now that I had had that opportunity. The regret of having squandered it too much, surfaces with surprising frequency.” Just I'll do a commentary. The notion again, and maybe that's what President Ward - he was my first president when I came. He always referred to Amherst as this place, capital T, capital P. I think this is true of any small liberal arts college. At least, that's what I like about small liberal arts colleges is that, years and years later, the impact and the experience is still there. This is somebody who now is, can I, can, I imagine 20 years after he left, he's thinking about being here positively or negatively. The experience did not end when he got his diploma. That's a lovely thought. That 20 years, you can laugh and go to these alumni, come back, they're like children given their nostalgia. But I want to believe that the experience of learning and the experience of teaching goes well beyond the individual day you teach or the individual semester, the individual year. And really, it's like planting a seed that germinates maybe not with everyone of course. So, when I got this from someone who was not my best student and whom I knew had not done all the reading, I think, gee, this is amazing. And then, a little, I don't know, explanation of why the book mattered to him. The experience of only recently reading Anna Karenina has, however, provided some solace. The issues raised over its many pages, passion and choice and loss, the often tragic trajectory of relationships, the struggle of recounting one’s, reconciling oneself with societal norms among others, resonated with me in ways that they could not have when I was a naive 20 year old - woefully inexperienced in the real stuff of life. Again, sometimes I have been frustrated, by my job. I can't believe that colleagues do not often feel this.

 [00:08:14]

 STANLEY:  I ask myself, are these people between the ages of 18 and 22, with all that's going on, really ready for what they're being asked to do? How can anyone, how could I at 20, understand Anna Karenina, my god, you need to live a life. Tolstoy once said, someone asked him to just explain or describe what Anna Karenina was about. He said, well, “if I had to explain what it was about, I'd have to rewrite it.” And so here is someone who of course at the time, and I must've known it, you know what I'm saying, oh god, why don't they jump up and say, oh, the many of them write beautiful papers and they understand it. So, I really loved the idea that now, later he was able to understand, absorb, and really relate to the issues which are very mature and adult issues that I'm not so sure a 20-year-old could do.

 [00:09:08]

 STANLEY:  And this really gave me enormous pleasure. And then of course, of course, this was not my rationale. Uh, clearly. So, again, what a letter like this and, and it's, it's one of the most eloquent I've gotten, but I've gotten, I'm sure colleagues have notes, postcards, letters, emails, uh, shows me what I've always wanted to believe that, uh, you, you can't judge a student. You can't judge an experience just on the basis of the here and now. This experience at best has to last a lifetime. This is always made me, I'm going off the topic a little, defensive about the humanities, which I know are facing hard times, but they've been facing hard times for many years and I sometimes will say either to myself or to students, just because our lives are so unpredictable and transient and we go from here to there and we don't know whether we're going to work or we will be, you will have this background, this experience for the rest of your life.

 [00:10:24]

 JYL:  Over the years that you've taught at Amherst, a lot has changed in the world. Has your teaching changed?

 STANLEY:  I've thought about that. I don't, it has, because, again, the people sitting in front of you have changed. I'm not so sure when I felt this or how I felt it, but, or what my reaction is always been. But clearly, for the last x number of years, 10 years, 12 years, 15 years, this has been a very different group of people. They're more visual. They have less, less patience. Of course. I've noticed that with language courses, fewer people, when I came to Amherst, it was not uncommon for many, many years that I'm, for seniors or juniors to take first year Russian. They weren't gonna major in it and they would have had to have known that after a year or two of Russian, you know, you're not going to learn that much. They just wanted the experience of learning something different.

 Of course, what has changed? This was a little new to me. Not totally strange because I, I was the first person in my family to make it through high school, much less go to college and get as far as I did. But I grew up in a, lower middle class, but in an element where I never heard of it, a single parent household. I just never did it in Brooklyn, New York and my, you just never did. We have diversity, but it was not what diversity is now. And so, well although I prided myself always that I never went to a single sex school, I only had a public education until I went to graduate school. I went to a public high school, I went to Brooklyn College. It was all public.

 And so, the, let us say, the profile, the emotional, intellectual, socioeconomic profile of so many of the students that I've been teaching is different. And, uh, I like to think, I'm not sure that is absolutely true that I can speak to them as well as anyone else. And one of the ways I've done it or I've tried to do it is to give them impression that I'm available, that I'm accessible, that they can come and talk to me without feeling embarrassed or humiliated, whatever, I'm certain things I’ll never say and that's fine.

 They taught me. It's a lovely, a symbiotic relationship. And, and, and I know I'm going on. I think, and I don't mean to sound, I'm sounding, I say sanctimonious, but for me, although there had been many frustrations and anger, moments of anger, if you, if an instructor feels that he or she can no longer learn from his or her students, maybe they should get out of the field.

 We’re talking about learning and we're talking about students and we're talking about being in the classroom. Maybe as much as my delight and challenge of doing what we were talking about with students is doing it with colleagues. When I look back and I looked back for 30 years, the opportunity I've had to, teach with others first with Rick Griffiths in Classics, then for two years with Joe in Philosophy, then a first-year seminar with Jenny Kallick in Music.

 [00:14:00]

 The opportunity to do that has been for me just, unimaginably enriching. Particularly at an undergraduate institution, we have to, I mean, administrations have to find ways. We have to find ways of helping faculty to keep going. We can't always be productive in ways that we are used to being productive. And if you don't have graduate students, there's, there may be a disadvantage. The notion that we have an opportunity to learn from each other, not only in a lunch room or in a committee. I understand that, but in the classroom, and I have to say is we started out and maybe we'll come full circle. You talked about Joe Epstein. I've learned from Rick and from Joe and from Jenny who have very different styles. I've learned about other ways to approach teaching and not necessarily that I'm going to adapt them to my own, but I've learned what other approaches can get from students so that I have been successful. And so that's been a wonderful opportunity for me, which I know good friends of mine have not had at larger institutions or even some smaller institutions. I regret that. I think they've lost something, but I'm certainly glad we have it here.

 JYL:  Thank you so much.

 STANLEY:  You're very welcome, Jyl.

 JYL:  Thank you again, Stanley, for taking the time to explore teaching at Amherst with us. And thanks to those of you who are listening for sharing your time with us.

 [Instrumental music by Walter Kitundu]