Why I teach over my students’ heads

Successful teaching is a work of empathy that stretches the mind.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A blackboard covered in chalk writing and highlights.

James's chalkboard.

I’ve been teaching college students for almost 30 years now. As much as I grumble during grading season, it is a pretty incredible way to make a living. I remain grateful.

I am not the most creative pedagogue. My preference is still chalk, but I can live with a whiteboard (multiple colors of chalk or markers are a must). Over the course of 100 minutes, various worlds emerge that I couldn’t have anticipated before I walked into class that morning. (I take photos of what emerges so I can remember how to examine the students later.) I think there is something important about students seeing ideas—and their connections—unfold in “real time,” so to speak.

I’ve never created a PowerPoint slide for a class. I put few things on Moodle, and only because my university requires it. I’ve heard people who use “clickers” in class and I have no idea what they mean. I find myself skeptical whenever administrators talk about “high impact” teaching practices (listening to lectures produced the likes of Hegel and Hannah Arendt; what have our bright shiny pedagogical tricks produced?). I am old and curmudgeonly about such “progress.”

But I care deeply about teaching and learning. I still get butterflies before every single class. I think (hope!) that’s because I have a sense of what’s at stake in this vocation.

I am probably most myself in a classroom. As much as I love research, and imagine myself a writer, the exploratory work of teaching is a crucial laboratory for both. I love making ideas come alive for students—especially when students are awakened by such reflection and grappling with challenging texts. You see the gears grinding. You see the brow furrowing. Every once in a while, you sense the reticence and resistance to an insight that unsettles prior biases or assumptions; but the resistance is a sign of getting it. And then you see the light dawn. I’m a sucker for that spectacle.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy.

Successful teaching is, fundamentally, a work of empathy. As a teacher, you have to try to remember your way back into not knowing what you now take for granted. You have to re-enter a student’s puzzlement, or even apathy, to try to catalyze questions and curiosity. Because I teach philosophy, my aim is nothing less than existential engagement. I’m not trying to teach them how to write code or design a bridge; I’m trying to get them to envision a different way to live. But, for me, it’s impossible to separate the philosophical project from the history of philosophy: to do philosophy is to join the long conversation that is the history of philosophy. So we are always wresting with challenging, unfamiliar texts that arrive from other times that might as well be other planets for students in the twenty-first century.

So successful teaching requires a beginner’s mindset on the part of the teacher, a charitable capacity to remember what ignorance (in the technical sense) feels like. To do so without condescension is absolutely crucial if teaching is going to be an art of invitation rather than an act of alienation. (The latter, I fear, is more common than we might guess.)

Such empathy means meeting students where they are. But successful teaching is also about stretching students’ minds and imaginations into new territory and unfamiliar habits of mind. This is where I find myself especially skeptical of pedagogical developments that, to my eyes, run the risk of infantilizing college students. (I remember a workshop in which a “pedagogical expert” explained that the short attention span of students required changing the PowerPoint slide every 8 seconds. This does not sound like a recipe for making students more human, I confess.)

That’s why I am unapologetic about trying to teach over my students’ heads. I don’t mean, of course, that I’m satisfied with spouting lectures that elude their comprehension. That would violate the fundamental rule of empathy. But such empathy—meeting students where they are—is not mutually exclusive with also inviting them into intellectual worlds and conversations where they won’t comprehend everything.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy, then part of the thrill, I think, is being admitted into a world where you don’t “get” everything.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy.

When I’m teaching, I think of this in a couple of ways. At the same time that I am trying to make core ideas and concepts accessible and understandable, I don’t regret talking about attendant ideas and concepts that will, to this point, still elude students. For the sharpest students, this registers as something to learn, something to be curious about. Or sometimes when we’re focused on, say, Pascal or Hegel, I’ll plant little verbal footnotes—tiny digressions about how Hannah Arendt engaged their work in the 20th century, or how O.K. Bouwsma’s reading of Anselm is akin to something we’re talking about. The vast majority of students won’t be familiar with either, but it’s another indicator of how big and rich and complicated the intellectual cosmos of philosophy is. For some of these students (not all, certainly), this becomes tantalizing: they want to become the kind of people for whom a vast constellation of ideas and thinkers are as familiar and present as their friends and cousins. This becomes a hunger to belong to such a world, to join such a conversation.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy. To both meet students where they are and, at the same time, teach “over their heads,” is an invitation to stretch into new terrain and thereby swell the soul into the fullness for which it was made. The things that skitter just over their heads won’t be on the exam, of course; but I’m hoping they’ll chase some of them for a lifetime to come.

This article was originally published on James K A Smith’s Substack Quid Amo.

Column

Culture

Royalty

14 February 2024

4 min read

Death focuses our minds on what really matters

From ballet tales to royal soap opera, stories shed light on Lent's dark mortality.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

In the style of a Rembrandt painting Prince Harry embraces his father King Charles.

Midjourney.ai

The season of Lent – the 40 days of penitential fasting preceding the great feast of Easter – is unavoidably about death and dying. Christians try to die to sin; the season culminates with the brutal, if salvific, death of the Christ on the cross on Good Friday and it’s said that if we, as disciples, can’t die with him at Calvary, then we can’t truly know what it is to rise with him at Easter dawn.

Those of us who attend an “ashing” service at church this Ash Wednesday, will have a cross traced on our foreheads by a priest, made from the ashes of the palm crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday, with the words: “Remember that dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Reprising folk goddess Joni Mitchell, we’re thus reminded that we are but stardust and these bodies that we lug about are all bound towards that destination. In short, we’re all going to die.

So as signs of new spring life are appearing all around, the Christian Church starts to wallow in existential misery. To paraphrase the lugubrious Mona Lott (geddit?) from the wartime BBC comedy It’s that Man Again, it’s being so cheerful that keeps we Christians going.

Against this, I’d like to mount a case that there really are reasons to be cheerful in Lent; that, if the words of the ancient Gregorian chant that “in the midst of life we are in death” are true, then the reverse is also true, that in the midst of death we’re living life.

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent.

This thought comes to me partly because of the extraordinary reconciliation and peace that families often experience as they lose one of their loved number. And it comes partly having just watched a livestream of the Royal Ballet’s latest production of Manon. Our heroine dies in a New Orleans penal colony, having been exiled as a prostitute from bourgeois Paris, sustained at the end not by worldly wealth but only by the devotion of her lover.

It’s quite a story – catch it if you can. It contains the key tenet of faith during Lent, that love conquers death. Having embraced our Lenten mortality, that’s the truth we endeavour to embrace at Easter. And that, for me, begins to put the love back into Lent, which is otherwise bleak and bitter, like the sour wine offered to the dying Christ.

My case is that it takes our mortality to clock what’s really important. And we witness that human realisation all the time. I believe we’ve just seen it in Prince Harry’s transatlantic flight to visit the King on his cancer diagnosis. King Charles becomes simply a dad again when his son is presented with the reality and realisation of his mortality, that sooner or later he is going to die.

As it turns out, that reality turns out to be infinitely more important than whether he got a smaller bedroom than his big brother when they were boys (copyright Spare, Bantam Press).

It’s stories like these – from Manon to the soap opera of the modern royals – that put human mortality into bas relief, so that we can see it properly. But it’s particularly Harry’s mercy mission to his father that chimes, for me, with a gospel story, or parable as we call them.

It’s not one that’s about kings or weddings – or even principally about death and dying. I’m thinking of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Plot synopsis: A landowner has two sons. The younger one asks to cash in his inheritance and travels away to a foreign land, where he spends all he has on a debauched lifestyle (cf. the Paris from which Manon “escapes”) and is reduced to tending pigs and coveting their swill. He returns humbled to the family estate, where his father welcomes him with a feast, much to the consternation of his brother.

Sound familiar? Sure, Charles isn’t God, as we assume the forgiving father to be in the parable. Nor is Harry asking to return, humbled and repentant (though we don’t know that, do we?). Nor has he been reduced to a diet of pigswill, unless California and Netflix contracts count as that.

Possibly more accurately cast is Prince William as the elder brother, who in the parable objects to his sibling’s welcome back, pointing out that he’s done all his father’s work without such reward.

Here, for our Lenten purposes, the father’s reply is key: “My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

Dead, but alive again. Lost, but found. These are the qualities that ameliorate the dark mortality of Lent. For royals, commoners, the trafficked, the desperate and alone, it delivers the one thing that death can’t extinguish: Hope.