Paul Skenazy–Teaching Statement 2001-02
Professor, American Literature

Stumbling Along

When my oldest son Jason was a baby first learning to stand on his own two feet, we were sitting one day on the beach. He was crawling and walking on his unsteady legs, falling this way and that, inserting whatever he could find into his mouth to get some taste of the world around him. I realized that I could, to an extent, control his experiments: place things in front of him, remove things from in front of him, offer him my own surprises in addition to the twigs, shells and rocks he found to stare at and gather. And so the two of us passed the time. He wandered around, stumbling over what came his way. I made sure the sand would provide a safe landing for his falls, and offered him bits and pieces of the world to pick up and ponder with his hands, eyes, nose, and mouth.

Jason is 18 now. He stands a solid 6' 4" tall on usually firm footing. He's a senior at Santa Cruz High taking classes up here at UCSC and ready to head off for college himself. But that event remains one I think about when I think about teaching. Not because most of my students are babies, nor because they are unstable. Not because I think of teaching as a displaced form of parenting. But still the anecdote helps me. As a teacher, I want to create a relatively safe classroom space where we, as a group, can stumble together over the same material, or material world. As a Literature and Writing teacher, the obstacles I insert in our way are written words: mostly prose, mostly American prose of the twentieth century; mostly fiction; some memoirs, some oral histories, some political and cultural commentary. The material varies depending on the course, the level of the class, the context—am I teaching a college core or a graduate seminar? talking to students versed in literary theory or trying to write academic discourse for the first time? But the invitation I provide remains essentially the same: we can share a space and fall all over ourselves trying to learn about the world. It's my job to create that space, to make it as inclusive and challenging as I can, and to provide interesting material worth the stumbling, worth the tasting.

In one of his essays, Lewis Thomas says that what scientists and artists share is not what they know but what they don't yet know, what he calls our mutual 'bewilderment.' I like that word 'bewilderment' for a lot of reasons. It seems right as a description of what prompts us as teachers and thinkers to explore our world—to find things to chew on, as my son Jason did. And the word itself is revealing: 'be wilder,' is the actual, if hidden, injunction, along with the suffix '–ment,' which refers to an action or process (the act of being bewildered). To 'be wilder' is actually to be lost: it derives from a source that means something like 'to stray about,' or 'to cause to lose one's way.' Like Jason, thinkers are wanderers, meanderers, travelling awkwardly among possibilities, unsure of destination, without predictable pathway. So 'bewilderment' is one of my metaphors too: as teachers we have the chance to share our pleasure in being disoriented, unclear about direction or what steps to take next. And we share too our efforts to move from this disorientation using certain awkward, frequently insufficient but helpful tools that we like to call a discipline (and the university likes to call a department).

Next metaphor, taken from a friend: the hoe. As teachers we turn over old soil, try to prepare it for new plantings. I try to help my students dig where the soil seems hard, intractable, dry from inattention. That's part of where writing comes into my work, whether the subject is William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Composition. I work best when I talk least, and make students write and revise most. I try to imagine writing exercises or projects that will tempt them into territory they might not otherwise explore: about themselves, about their reactions to a novel or memoir, about how language or point of view work to claim and remake the world we think we know. We write together in class, we write each night, we read stuff we've written to each other, we revise and revise and revise. The work the students do sits alongside the professional writing as our texts, to study for form, for exclusions, for moments requiring more attention. My job is to help students discover the untended patches: what remained unnoticed in reading, was left unchallenged in thinking, seems discordant in a paragraph of writing. There is much to learn from what we neglect or pass over, and why. So I urge us all to get out our handhoes--the pencil and pen and computer keys—and turn back to that neglected bit of prose, emotion, idea, memory.

Writing is a gaudy, wonderfully messy place to root around. Stories and metaphors offer startling cacophanies of clashing colors and forms, joinings where two or more seemingly disparate elements of the world are linked, temporarily, by the imagination. All stories are visions and evasions; all metaphors fall apart eventually and so lose their usefulness. It is just this essential ambiguity of stories and metaphors that makes them so exhilirating—and frustrating. The best stories don't 'add up' or balance like a formula, reduce to a sound bite, convert to a simple sentence or moral or truth. Living in them, teaching through them, reading them with students, I play: and hopefully, some of the time, help others see how to make meaning out of whatever comes one's way; how to push a connection up to the breaking point; how to relish the paradoxes that swim effortlessly in the stream of narrative. I have found over the years that I can't outline my lectures or conversations in a class with any success, and gradually I've come to take comfort in that fact. I will, for example, often begin class with aphorisms, or put up a few general ideas or issues on the board for people to consider. But as I turn back to the board to illustrate points, I find myself complicating things: putting in opposing directional arrows between concepts, circling ideas and shifting their location in relation to others. When I'm done, the blackboard behind me is usually a mess, a landscape of words with too many, contradictory, roadsigns to allow safe passage. I take a certain perverse pride in that mess, realizing that I am not the teacher students look to for certainties, but for something more like multiplicity, a plethora of unresolved possibilities. We can return to the basic premises, the starting aphorisms, again next class, but only so long as we're all willing to leave two hours later with some intellectual mud under our fingernails.

I not only teach stories but also teach best through stories—of my children, of writers and their lives, of friends and former students, of catchers in the rye and women warriors, of scarlet letters and the beloved and restless ghosts of dead children. When Jason was just a bit older than at that beach scene, he taught me this too: Whatever it is I say I teach, there's something else that is more deeply conveyed, that happens willynilly, when anyone talks about work they adore. I always read to Jason, from the first days he would sit still enough to listen or fall asleep to my voice in his crib, through the months of cloth books he'd grab into his mouth, to our years of Dr. Seuss and Leo Lionni and William Steig. And long before he knew his alphabet, he'd 'read' to himself sometimes: find a book or a random bit of paper and mouth sounds out loud. One day we were coming into the house and I picked up my mail—mostly junk mail, advertising brochures, credit card offers and the like. I absentmindedly handed envelopes to him and he proceeded to examine them, one by one, carefully, seriously. He seemed particularly absorbed by one card which he turned over in his hand, looking at it in several directions. So I finally asked him what it said. He held it solemnly before him at arm's length and told me, "Says I love you."

So much for my inattention, my absentmindedness. There was the reading I needed: that what I had been doing all those years, all those nights and days of him sitting on my lap as I read, was tell him that I loved him as I offered him what little I know of the world. At some level, we teach the notion that to read, to write, and to talk about books—to join in the community of people who share themselves in words—is an act of love, compassion and faith, even when the words are most angry, bitter, and resistant to such simple pieties. Classrooms are not designed for lovefests, but if we can't develop some spirit of joint enterprise over the course of ten weeks, even in a lecture hall of 200 or more, then we lose much of the energy and purpose of our work.

Let me end with two more metaphors I find reassuring as I think about teaching. The first comes from aviation. A standard trick question is to ask people what percent of the time a plane is 'on course' during a flight between two airports. The correct answer is 1-3%—hopefully landing and takeoff, at least. But in between, the flight is a process of straying from and returning to the flight pattern: to be slightly off course need not signal danger.

And last, a metaphor that comes, with apologies to her, from Julie Kimball, the remarkable Yoga teacher who has been working with students here in our OPERS program for years. Julie used to title her classes 'Beginning Yoga,' 'Intermediate Beginning Yoga,' and 'Advanced Beginning Yoga' (now, limited to two levels, they are 'Beginning Yoga' and 'Continuing Beginning Yoga'). That's how I feel about teaching: it's a discipline, or vocation, or job, where you are a beginner for life. You learn more about what you're doing over the years, you practise more, your muscles become more limber as you repeat your asanas, exercises, forms, and try out new moves. But essentially, basically, we all remain beginners, struggling to be conscious of what we are doing, why, and what effects what we do has on us, and on our students. Beginner's mind, in the zen sense: an openness to what we don't know we're going to find out because what we do know is that we don't know what there is to find out. When I can nurture that faith, and enter the classroom with that evenness of spirit and quiet curiosity, I teach well, and learn.