Chronicle of Higher Education, Friday, August 9, 2002, by Peter S. Temes
For the original article, see chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i48/48b00501.htm.

The college classroom is a risky place. Professors often enter it defended by crisp syllabuses, lesson plans, class notes, and, most powerful of all, a great deal of knowledge that their students don't have.

"My worst nightmare," a friend of mine told me in graduate school when we were both TAs, "is the class where the students have good questions and I have no answers. They ask and ask and ask, and I keep coming up blank." The most common metaphor I hear from other teachers for this kind of unprotectedness is being naked, full of implications about secrets revealed, imperfections on display, and irreducible vulnerability.

My own aspirations as a teacher include being as naked as possible, though never shorn of my tweeds. My best experiences have come when I've presented genuine problems to my students—not exercises, not gambits or icebreakers or stage setting for my own killer analytical prowess, but problems that I find engaging yet am unable to solve myself.

Some students hate this kind of teaching, though in my experience more like it than dislike it, if the professor approaches it honestly. Even those students who don't like it benefit from it, perhaps even more than those to whom swimming in murky waters comes more naturally. The resisters are nudged away from the easy passivity that characterizes too many college classes, and get practice in critical engagement of supposed superiors.

I recall one student evaluation that said, accusingly, "I couldn't tell whether Professor Temes even believed what he was saying." I remember that class, and I couldn't tell either. Students were required to pay closer attention because I had few answers for them, though plenty of questions. They got to see me confused, concerned, and almost overwhelmed by the new ideas I was encountering—ideas put there by students. They got to see me cut off from the security of my greater knowledge and scripted lessons. And it was good for them.

One example of useful nakedness that changed my own understanding of a long-familiar text came when I taught Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to a group of undergraduates. King's 1963 letter is a complex, challenging text written in response to another public letter, one from clergy members in Birmingham, urging him to roll up his antisegregation street campaign and leave town. King replies from his jail cell that peaceful protest to injustice—even if it unleashes violent repression—is always a good thing, and that anyone who cares about justice has standing to protest injustice anywhere (King was living in Atlanta at the time). The root problem according to King was not protest, but the latent violence that protest brought to the surface, violence perpetrated mostly by local Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor and his police force.

As a scholar, I had a lot of information about the context of King's text that my students did not have, and short of them writing their own dissertations about King (as I did), they probably would not acquire much of it. I shared some, through the usual mix of lecture and classroom conversation. But then I asked my students to wrestle with a question that made me uncomfortable: Although King's politics were left of center, could "Letter from Birmingham Jail" be seen as a rightist, small-government text? He was, after all, protesting government action against citizens.

My personal reaction was emotional revulsion to a right-wing claim on King, but, over time, I came to suspect that there was a "there" there in the thesis. I could not talk to too many colleagues about this—they tended to hate the idea even more than I did. But my students grabbed onto it. They argued with each other, and (sometimes heatedly) with me. I had no real answer, no coup de grace with which to wrap up discussion and establish that I was the master of the class and in control of the text. I was neither, and from that fact grew a series of the greatest classroom discussions I have ever had.

The direct conveyance of factual information is important, of course, as is classroom work to clarify and distill that information. But after the facts are clear, the connections among them, their applications and interpretive significance—all that is the beginning of the kind of work best done in the intellectual world of the college classroom. It is where the student loses confidence that no matter how far the teacher leads the class into the woods, the teacher knows the way back home. Students discover at such moments that real learning changes everything, a hard realization for many.

After all, the best reason to go to college rather than, say, a fine free-standing library (think of the savings, were information the only point!) is to live for a time not only among teachers but among master learners. What students often find most precious is exposure to the ways practiced scholars and thinkers approach what they don't know. College, after all, is not about the easy movement through ideas guided by benevolent masters. It's about the harder stuff.

That harder stuff is not only harder to make happen, it's also harder to observe and measure. Because of this, many departments come to emphasize the kinds of teaching that are friendliest to observation and measurement, something akin to looking on the kitchen floor for the diamond you've lost in the living room, because the light is so much better in the kitchen.

I worked for a department head in New England who strongly believed in clarity and purpose in the classroom above all else. He had 40 full-time faculty members and a theory that many instructors weren't fully succeeding because they were not clear enough in their classes about what they were trying to teach their students. "Tell them what you're trying to teach them," he said, "and they'll work harder to learn it." He even created special course-evaluation forms that posed the question to students, "What do you think your professor was trying to teach you?"

I taught for him a few times and was skeptical about his approach. The first time he sat in on a class of mine, he wrote in his evaluation that I had "the potential to become a great teacher." A year later, he sat in again, and began his evaluation by writing that "if you are ever to reach your potential to become a great teacher, you must focus more on telling your students what exactly it is that you are trying to teach them."

So I tried it. For that one semester, I wrote on the syllabus that I was trying to teach them three or four specific things about how the documentation and interpretation of history seem to work, and about writing well (the course was "Writing About History"). The classes took on a more focused quality than others I had taught. The students performed better. There were fewer surprises.

But in the end, I was disappointed. We had fewer "Eureka!" moments. I learned less and had less fun than I generally do when I teach. By focusing so intently on lessons that I had thought up before class, I cut off many chances to teach other lessons—lessons that in my experience have the potential to be more engaging, more original, and, taken as a whole, more important. I did impress my boss, though, and my student ratings went up.

Most professors learn in graduate training that failure in scholarship is not rewarded at all. Success is the point—an experiment that works, a discovery of artifacts rather than an empty hole in the desert sands, an interpretive solution to an important problem in a text, rather than an interesting interpretive dead end.

Yet we know that success in scholarship is a function of risk and failure. A risk skillfully taken tends to lead in the direction of success, but the interim stages tend to be failures when viewed in isolation. A good scholar comes to appreciate the lessons in those failures, and to take important meaning from them.

Should we not create a comfortable context for intellectual risk and failure in the classes we teach, then? And if we have the courage to do this, are we willing to be honest in our syllabuses and say that our courses won't always proceed down comfortably predictable paths—that we don't want them to? Are we willing to structure our courses around the very edges of our own understanding, so that we may bring to them problems to solve that we care deeply about but do not, ourselves, fully understand? Can we be that naked, at least now and then?

Most professors are inclined to say no. Why? First, risk taking destabilizes our position as masters of the class. (Though in general, my experience is that teachers think on their feet better than most students do, which reasserts a kind of master status. It is, after all, for the very sake of narrowing this gap that naked instruction is so valuable.)

Risk taking also means that we cannot neatly productize our classes, always following the syllabus, always ending with a scripted, if false, sense of completion, and giving our students an uncomplicated consumer experience. (I enjoy imagining this student evaluation: "Professor Christ ended class early when heaven and earth were united, an event clearly not on the syllabus. I feel that I did not get the class I was promised in the course catalog.") And risk-filled instruction is hard to measure, because it embraces originality, and seeks to do more than fulfill expectations.

All good reasons to be tame, but for the passionate professor, nakedness has greater charms.