Bruce Thompson – Teaching Statement 2001-02
Lecturer, History

Magic Time

The actor Jack Lemmon used to say to himself before every performance: "it's magic time." He was trying to calm his own nerves, but also acknowledging the transforming power of his art. I experience a similar sense of anticipation when a course or a class begins. And I know that I have succeeded when a student tells me that one of my classes has changed or clarified or enriched his or her view of the world in some way.

We teachers invite our students to explore a subject. We introduce them to the goals and methods of a discipline, to its classic texts as well as to the frontiers of research. We stress that the subject cannot be exhausted in a single quarter, and we hope that learning and reading will continue beyond the limits of the course. We strive to leave our students with a sense that they can participate actively in the continuously evolving debates that engage us.

I teach courses on modern European history, Jewish history and literature, Irish history, and cinema history. Each of my courses draws on a variety of media and genres: historical monographs, but also novels, poetry, drama, film, and autobiography. In my surveys of modern European history, I have found that I can use a film by Charlie Chaplin to make a point about immigration, or a painting by Goya to illustrate the atrocities of Napoleon's wars, or an essay by Dickens to illustrate the miseries of the urban poor. I am particularly fond of the great twentieth-century poets from central and eastern Europe who have repeatedly responded to the catastrophes of modern history with language so powerful that it overcomes the limits of translation.

From my own experience as an undergraduate I learned how a good discussion leader can use the Socratic method to help students to understand that they know more than they think they know. Perhaps their first impressions or formulations are inadequate in some ways, but the free exchange of ideas and opinions helps students to refine their own thinking, to give it greater depth and coherence. In the best classroom discussions, the conversation builds towards some tentative conclusion or crystallization of insight. I prefer to use short texts in the classroom, or brief extracts from larger texts. With everyone's attention focused on the same passage or passages, the results can be quite remarkable: a sort of collective process of close reading, with each contribution building on its predecessor. (I have learned this method from teachers of literature, including my late teacher Ian Watt, whose collected essays I have edited.)

The visual arts have been especially helpful to me in solving one of the difficulties of the classic lecture format: the human attention span varies in length, but for most students it is probably less than seventy minutes. Even the most eloquent lecturer may struggle to hold everyone's attention for more than an hour with words alone. So I almost always begin with a clip from a documentary film: an art historian's analysis of an Impressionist painting; a scene from one of Ibsen's plays; a speech by Churchill or Hitler; a group of well-rehearsed students presenting an avuncular Stalin with flowers on his seventieth birthday. The film clips are icebreakers: they set the stage for the lecture that follows, they stimulate the historical imagination, and they whet the appetite for an explanation of some historical moment, trend, or problem. The lecture begins with a comment on the film. And then I do my best to follow the example of the best lecturers I have heard over the course of my own career as a student. I try to combine narrative and analysis: to announce a problem clearly at the outset, to build and maintain suspense while working toward a solution, and to achieve a satisfactory sense of closure at the end.

Over the last several years I have made at least one significant change in my teaching. I began to distribute increasingly detailed notes with each lecture, and eventually I placed several series of these notes (for modern European history and European intellectual history) on web-sites. I believe that the notes provide a very useful distillation of the lectures and that most students read them closely. They are not complete transcripts and they do not include many references to the film clips that begin each lecture, but I think that each set of notes offers a good synthesis of the state of scholarly knowledge (and my own evolving views) on an important topic. I have also begun to embellish the lecture notes with photographs and maps, and with revealing quotations from both contemporary sources and modern historians. The notes, like the lectures, emphasize patterns and connections, parallels and contrasts. And knowing that the students will have these condensed versions of the lectures enables me to be more spontaneous in my delivery and to highlight important points more effectively.

I believe that a really successful course offers something like a conversion experience for students. I do not mean that a teacher should be a missionary for his discipline or that he should seek disciples. On the contrary, a liberal education implies that students will be equipped and encouraged to challenge even the most authoritative views, including those of their teachers. But one also hopes that the course will enable students to see the subject, and perhaps the world, in a new way. That is what I mean by a conversion experience: the recognition, at once humbling and empowering, that the subject is larger, richer, more exciting and fascinating, than the student had previously suspected. To have the opportunity to facilitate that discovery is one of the teacher's great privileges.