Students are losing the ability to listen, and this interfees with their ability to use language and logic and attend to well-wrought lectures.

t a high school reunion, an old classmate, now a lawyer, posed the conventional question about what I had been doing for a living over the past twenty years. "I teach English literature at a small liberal arts college," I told him. He paused and replied, "Ah, teaching. A noble profession." To my ear, that old-fashioned phrase, "a noble profession," sounded like such an artificial, scripted response that I assumed he was being ironic at my expense. Yet our exchange continued in a vein that made it clear that he meant it quite sincerely, without a trace of irony.
        That reunion was ten years ago. Now a midlife, midcareer academic who came of intellectual age during the culture wars, I recently received a teaching award; the honor gave rise to some long stretches of introspection about what it means to teach. Although I have more or less kept faith with my earliest vocational ideas, I would feel embarrassed to use the word noble for my profession. In my lexicon, noble is reserved for Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan, teachers in inner-city schools, social workers in depressed rural areas, and volunteers of every stripe--not professors like me at expensive liberal arts colleges, spending sabbatical time contemplating the meaning of what I do when I am not on sabbatical. Yet, only with the release of sabbatical have I had the time for such self-examination, and that self-examination led to the surprising (to me, anyway) conclusion that the very different sorts of courses we teach in the aftermath of the canon and culture wars will matter less over time than the very different ways we now teach. I was not surprised to find myself satisfied with the evolution of the content in my courses; I reckon myself, after all, a "liberal." I am surprised, however, to find myself so skeptical about the much-vaunted new technologies and their effects on learning and teaching. I had not counted on becoming a Luddite after so long a romance with technology.

Losing the ability to Listen

hat worries me most is that my students are losing the ability to listen, especially to listen mindfully and with pleasure. I suspect that loss is a consequence of both the new technologies that deliver information in nanoseconds as well as the prevailing pedagogy that calls for a student-centered classroom. Over the course of more than twenty years of teaching, I have observed that increasingly what we talk about when we talk about teaching is how to enhance classroom discussions. Professionally, the ability to promote student discussion is valorized in the humanities. Every job application I have read emphasizes the primacy of cultivating students' voices in the classroom, regardless of the candidate's field of specialization or theoretical allegiance. Reference letters take pains to emphasize

how effectively the applicant creates a comfortable, empowering space for undergraduates in a classroom. At my institution, we require job candidates to teach a fifty-minute class, after which we interview the students in attendance. Overwhelmingly, students give high marks to those candidates who "cared what we had to say" or "encouraged us to participate." Candidates who "talked too much" are typically disesteemed, while those who "listened to what we had to say" are favored by a long shot. I admit that the uniformity of their evaluative criteria often depresses me, although it should not be surprising. We teach students to privilege their own voices, as indicated by the questions we ask them on the teaching evaluation forms they fill out each semester.
        I believe in the place of the students' voices in the learning process, and I don't dismiss the high marks students award us for respecting their views. At the same time, I do regret that we have come to devalue the lecture as a mode of learning and I wonder if the well-wrought lecture is on its way to becoming a pedagogical fossil (at least in the humanities). When I was a teaching assistant, I received relatively little guidance on teaching, but what I did receive--whether formally or informally--was advice on generating class discussion and crafting assignments. The anecdotal evidence I have gathered from interviews with job candidates and conversations with younger colleagues suggests that even though instruction of grad students is taking place in graduate programs, little attention is still being given on how to construct an effective--dare I say, even wonderful--lecture.
        Years ago, when I served as the graduate teacher's assistant for a semester-abroad program in London, I could see how difficult it was for the American undergraduates to appreciate the lectures delivered by British academics. They were uncomfortable and sometimes irritated by the lecturers' one-hour talks, which left them in a stunned silence by the time the question and answer part arrived. I often wondered what the visiting British professors made of the slack-jawed Americans with so little to say. Yet a couple of those lectures were quite stunning and were delivered with animation, even passion. The offering of a lecture is half of an intellectual transaction, one that seeks to draw students into an apprehension of how the past makes claims upon them. The transaction wobbles if the lecturer fails to shape the material to meet those ends; it collapses entirely if the auditor fails to apprehend where he or she is being taken. Some professors may not be great lecturers, but we all find ourselves standing in front of groups of students who have not been trained to perform as listeners.

Bits and Fragments

t's no news flash to point out that, increasingly, material is packaged in sound bites and fragments, coming faster than the mind can register it. On the Internet, text is minced into tiny hyperlinked bits strung out on a web whose connecting strands of meaning are neither immediately apparent nor easily discerned, if at all. There are virtues in having abundant resources available, and I have, at times, eagerly used that technology as a teaching tool. But there are losses great and small. Some might count it a small loss, perhaps, if they have never sat down in an overheated room at a big wooden table in a library to read and think and daydream over the volumes spread on it. Perhaps my nostalgia and good fortune at growing up in a town with a well-funded public library overtake me here. However, we cannot ignore questions about how electronic media may diminish the process of accretion of ideas as well as our society's collective respect for that slow process of understanding. When the message of the medium is speed and simultaneity, not linearity, knowledge is reduced to a keyword, not a concept. Tantalizing vortices are flattened out into a set of cross-references.
        Furthermore, computers and word processing have an enormous impact on how we compose our ideas into prose. Benefits like the logistical ease of revision cannot be understated, but I am concerned about the effects of learning to compose at a screen with a relentlessly pulsating cursor, as is the case for nearly all of my students these days. Of late, I find myself prescribing to students whose prose has coherence problems that they write out their drafts in longhand--that quaint term. Drafting by hand has enabled some to grasp more firmly the heads and tails of

what they are trying to express. Word processing allows the writer to cut, paste, and rearrange with such ease that the logical presentation of ideas comes to feel almost arbitrary. I still have to drag the No. 2 lead pencil across the sheet of paper on the yellow pad. Even though I have pathologically bad penmanship, I simply can't compose any serious writing while looking at a screen on which I can never see more than a couple of paragraphs, if that, at a time. I lose my way. It becomes too tempting to confuse appearance with substance and to persuade myself that attractive typography represents high-quality thinking.
        More than ever, we need language and logic to help string out our thoughts as we try to comprehend the sectarian hatreds, violence, and inhumanity we witness nightly on our larger-than-ever televisions, where the heads talk while words march on and on, single file across the bottom of our screens. Since September 11, I have questioned the social usefulness of my occupation. At various points in my career, I have wondered about the enterprise of teaching--even of my own beloved Victorian literature--in what often feels like an economically driven "marketplace" of expensive liberal arts colleges. I feel burdened by the extent of what seems a growing anti-intellectualism among my students, a hostility toward ideas, toward the pleasures of the text.
        Yet I suspect that my own undergraduate professors lamented the anti-intellectualism of my wave of baby boomers who flooded colleges and universities, with so many of us coming from the suburban middle classes, or like me, from blue-collar homes where there were no bookcases lining the walls, where literature came packaged as Reader's Digest condensed novels, and reference tools were the encyclopedias purchased volume by volume at the local grocery store. When I need a dose of humility, I conjure up myself at nineteen. It helps me to remember that sometimes "getting it" just takes a little more time for some of us.

A Terrible Moment

any of my students will never really understand or care very much about the realist aesthetic of Victorian fiction or the difference between free, indirect discourse and omniscient narration, but I believe that everyone has the capacity to be imaginatively moved by literature. In her last novel, Daniel Deronda, the Victorian intellectual George Eliot spoke of a terrible moment when "the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in ... neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into [individuals'] own lives." I can't claim that the earth quakes regularly in my own classroom, but at its best, teaching literature can usher students into that terrible moment of recognition and rescue them from lives of self-absorption and cultural insularity.
        In Take Time for Paradise, the late Bartlett Giamatti--onetime president of Yale and baseball commissioner--spoke lovingly of baseball as a game that reenacts the eternal myth of exile and return. The batter leaves home and returns home, travels counterclockwise, as if defying time, only to start all over again next time up at bat with another chance at getting it just right. Maybe that is the best, most promising way for academics to imagine what we do in our profession. We begin in the fall with new students who look younger and younger every year but who do not, in truth, age at all. We ride the rhythms to our last finals in the bloom of spring, when we mark the end of our year with a ceremony we call a "commencement." Then it's autumn again, and we're up at bat again with another chance for a homer. Yes, in the balance of things, many professions are more noble than teaching, but few are so entirely hopeful.

Patricia O'Hara is an associate professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College, teaching Victorian literature, her field of research. She is currently working on a collection of personal essays.