Curious George, the Clichémeister
Of the experience of teaching a doctoral seminar in Geneva for twenty-five years, Steiner, with characteristic overstatement, remarks that this was “as near as an ordinary, secular spirit can come to Pentecost.” He then pulls out one of the two great clichés used by teachers to describe their experience: “By what oversight or vulgarization should I have been paid to become what I am? When, and I have felt this with sharpening malaise, it might have been altogether more appropriate for me to pay those who invited me to teach?” In other words, he would have done it for nothing. (The other standard teaching cliché has to do with how much a teacher has learned from his students.)
I recently closed down a university teaching career of thirty years, and I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn’t have done it for a penny less. Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and boring repetition–a teacher, it has been said, never says anything once–interrupted only occasionally by moments of always surprising exultation. And I should like to add that I don’t think I learned a thing from my students, except that, as one student evaluation informed me, I tend to jingle the change in my pocket.
