“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
PDF file of the whole collection
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Becoming a Teacher, 28–44
When I look back at my fifty years of being a teacher, it feels as though I was always becoming one. Even near the end of those fifty years, I was still figuring things out about how to teach, still creating new ways to present old material.
I didn’t start that way, though. During the first four or five years, I simply told students things all class period. I read from my notes, elaborated on them, and asked whether there were any questions. Sometimes there were, but mostly there weren’t.
How can you be a philosophy professor and not prompt students to ask their own questions?
Diary of a Mad Professor:
Reflecting on Thirty Years of Teaching
at Trinity College
In one of his mad farmer poems, Wendell Berry writes, “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world.” Some lines later he says, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” And he ends the poem with these two words: “Practice resurrection.”1
I am not sure how to describe the madness of Berry’s farmer. It is not angry-mad or crazy-mad, though it borders on the latter. Nevertheless, it is something I like. It captures my imagination. It revels in contradiction. And it recommends resurrection.
Loving the World
Last year, Ann, who graduated from the college in 2004, texted me a quote from Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets: “Oh! How rich it is to love the world!”2 I texted back, “Yes!!!”
I put the quote on the board a couple of days later in my Love and Friendship class. The subject for the day was Plato’s conception of eros-love. Plato thought that the best love was of pure beauty, which one gradually ascends to after first loving the beauty of individual persons. This ascent was designed by Plato to remove one from the changing realm of particular things, where there is messiness and decay, mortality and corruption. An old gospel song exhibits a similar sentiment: “This world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.”
I, however, side with Mary Oliver. Or, rather, I think one can love this world as well as live for the next. In fact, it seems impossible to live for the next world without loving this one. If I did not treasure the flowers in my backyard or the smiles on my coworkers’ faces, I would not treasure what I find when I open the door to my home beyond the grave. The God whom I expect to meet when I am hiking in the mountains is one whom I expect relishes mountains. So why cannot I relish them, too? I am far richer when I do.
The class was divided. Some wanted to gaze on the great sea of beauty and some wanted individual bodies to love. That night I texted Ann to tell her I used the quote in class. She texted back with a smile face.
Extracurricular Teaching
A year ago I was lying on a physical therapist’s table getting my injured feet worked on.
“You are sixty-seven and still teaching?” the therapist asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “Last Sunday evening, several students and I got together and read Anne of Green Gables to each other. You can’t do that very many places.”
It was just Sara, Jaime, and me. We met in the new lower dining hall on campus, then found a quiet place at the end of a narrow hallway. I sat on the floor on one side, Jaime sat on the other side, and Sara in between.
“Why do you do that?” the therapist wondered.
“Just because,” I answered. Then, because she had a puzzled look on her face, I added, “It’s extracurricular teaching.”
“Oh,” she said with a knowing nod.
But it wasn’t “teaching” at all. It was simply reading together and giggling at Anne’s adventures. I did not have any motive beyond experiencing these. Nor did I conceive the event to be a teaching moment. It was just there, in the hallway, on the floor.
Of course, Sara and Jaime will remember my voice and twinkling eyes as I read my page. I will remember their voices and childlike glee as they read their pages. And remembering vivid and delightful events, I have discovered, lights up an otherwise ordinary afternoon.
Finding Answers
When I first started teaching, I did what I saw my teachers do—I argued for what I thought were good philosophical viewpoints. And when I gave tests, I got those viewpoints back, along with what I thought were good reasons for them, which I had also given them. It took me four or five years before I realized what was happening. The students wanted good grades, so they gave me what they thought would get them.
I quit, cold turkey. And then what I got on tests was chaos. The answers, however, belonged to the students.
Every semester I face a dilemma: If I give answers, students are more likely to accept them, or say they accept them, because I, the professor, have made a case for them. And that is likely to rub off onto their faith—which means it is no faith at all. If I do not give answers, whatever philosophical answers students adopt will belong to them. That, too, rubs off onto faith.
The risk, of course, is that some students will change their minds about long-held beliefs. But the reward is that other students will find the faith they thought they had. College students want to figure things out on their own, and they would rather run the risk of being wrong than give up that desire.
Besides, it is better for them to experience what real life is like, where the answers are not given—actually, where numerous competing answers are given and one must determine which are right. Students cannot be prepared for that if they develop a mindset of simply ingesting what their professors give them.
A Secret
I was bubbling at Clark Street and Belmont Avenue in Chicago with a carload of students when a couple of former Trinity College students walked by on the other side of the street. I waved them over. After exchanging hello’s, one of them who had taken my Introduction to Philosophy class some years earlier said, “I remember that class. That was where I lost my faith.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I lost my childhood faith and got one of my own.”
“Ah!” I replied, with a big smile on my face.
And now I reveal a long-kept secret, one that I have divulged to only one or two others during the last thirty years. I am an evangelist. I do not come in the front door openly proclaiming the truth of Christianity. I unobtrusively slip in the back door asking questions. Some students, I am sure, leave Trinity wondering whether they can keep their childhood faith, but others own it for the first time.
What I Want Students to Do
I want students to think for themselves. I want students to care about their faith. I want students to become passionate about learning and also about living. I want students to learn to listen. I want students to blow bubbles and swish in the fall leaves. I want students to sit on the sidewalk beside a homeless person on a busy Chicago street. I want students to remember kind eyes that gazed into theirs. I want students to dream. I want students to feel more keenly the magnificence and tragedy they encounter.
Sayings of a Mad Professor
Good: Live as if it is your last day. Better: Live as if it is your first day.
Don’t try to change the world—that is too big and abstract. Don’t even try to change individuals—they won’t like it and will resist you. Rather, change yourself, and others will change as a result.
Text a friend, “Good morning,” some random day.
Do you want to love God? Then keep your heart open to your neighbors’ tears and smiles.
When you are with someone, be with them.
Practice resurrection.
Teaching Forever
Five years ago the alumni director at Trinity asked me to say a few words at an evening homecoming dinner for college alumni. I composed a poem for the occasion, “Remembering Twenty-Five Years of Extracurricular Teaching,” but the emcee forgot to call on me. Here are the last two verses of that forgotten poem:
I decided a couple of weeks ago, again,
That I like the teaching life—
Interaction with students in class and out,
Reading, writing, staring out the window.
I may just get so caught up with it that,
Like the history professor in the fifth
Harry Potter book who was so busy teaching
He didn’t notice he had died,
I, too, will keep right on teaching
And not notice when I have died.
Notes
1 Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” in Wendell Berry, Collected Poems: 1957-1982 (New York: North Point Press, 1984), pp. 151-52.
2 From Mary Oliver, “The Sweetness of Dogs (Fifteen),” Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), p. 23.
Published in Trinity Magazine, Spring 2012, 20–23
Learning to Teach
Getting a Ph.D. is for learning the subject matter you are studying. It doesn’t teach you how to teach. At least not normally.
Of course, those of us who were teaching assistants while getting a Ph.D. could practice teaching. But did we know what we were doing?
I thought I did. I did what my professors did, both in college and graduate school. And what they did was tell me things. The philosophers among them modeled being a philosopher—here are the options, here is the best one, the others are not good because of such and such. They hoped their students would do the same.
But having something modeled for you is not enough. You actually have to try it for yourself. So after four or five years, when I finally realized that all I was getting on exams was what I had told them, I stopped spending the whole class period modeling. Actually, I stopped modeling altogether. And I started asking questions.
In preparing for classes, I not only went over the subject for the day, but I wrote down a slew of questions. I went to class early and put the best ones on the board.
I clearly had to tell the class some things. I couldn’t just pop a question. So I explained some of the themes in the reading for the day, with special reference to one of the questions. Then I asked the question. After a bit, I checked that question and explained the context for another question on the board, and so on. We hardly ever got through all the questions.
It wasn’t, however, until a couple of decades later that I discovered how to conduct class discussions. Instead of waiting for students to respond, I called on them. In the first class period of a course, I started at the person in the front row to my far left and went right. In the next class period I started at the person in the front row to my far right and went left. Then I started with someone in a back row and went up, or someone in a middle row and went one way or the other, or sometimes the eighth person from a person in some row at whom I randomly pointed. That created a little drama as I counted off.
Usually after four or five answers, hands went up. Sometimes I called on those persons, and sometimes I kept going to the right or left or up or down.
This method ensured that everyone had a chance to talk. The talkers did not dominate the discussion (which can get annoying and boring). Shy people could have their say. Males did not talk more than females. White students did not talk more than nonWhite students. (You can check the studies on these.)
I soon learned that I couldn’t just ask each person the same question, the one I had put on the board. I varied the question slightly after the second or third person I had called on, depending on what the previous student had said. Sometimes I asked how a person I had called on would react to what the previous person had said. Occasionally, in a puzzled tone of voice, I asked someone who had just given an answer to a question, “Can I ask you a question?” The person knew they were going to get a question they might not be able to answer. They always said, “yes,” but sometimes rather hesitantly.
All the questions were “stretch” questions. If a student said simply that they believed such and such, I held out my hand, palm up, directing it to the person, which meant, “Can you explain that?” No student ever misunderstood that hand motion. (I got it from my high school geometry teacher for whom the hand motion meant, “Give your reason for saying that.”)
One big thing about this method was that I could not rely on my notes to keep control of how the class went. I had to know the subject matter so well that I could vary the questions as I called on students up or down a row. I’m not sure I could have conducted class like this when I first started teaching. It would have been too scary.
Another big thing is that no two classes on the same subject were ever the same. Each class was like a work of art created on the spot by me and the students working together. The end of the class period almost always came too quickly.
That felt much more rewarding to me than simply lecturing. And students were doing and not just watching.
Attentive readers will say, “But Cliff! You didn’t stop modeling being a philosopher. You were just doing it in a different way—a better way, to be sure—but still modeling.” And those readers would be right, though it wasn’t just modeling. It was also doing, both me and the students.
“To Prepare You for Dying”
For two decades of college teaching I listed three objectives in the syllabi for the philosophy courses I was teaching: to become acquainted with core philosophical issues, to interact with these issues, and to assess them from a Christian perspective.
These objectives varied a bit depending on what particular course I was teaching, but there were never more than these three. It did not occur to me that there might be many more aims a course could have. And I never asked myself what else I wanted students to obtain from a course. Courses were academic enterprises, I presumed, and should not be tainted with extraneous intentions. To do so would be to compromise academic integrity.
Then I changed. It wasn’t just that my beliefs about courses changed. I changed. I began reading the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Some of their probing inquisitiveness into deep human motivation rubbed off.
I began listening to students in my office, at lunch, in the hallway, on the telephone. I discovered that they had feelings and dreams for the future. I asked them, “What do you like most about living?” (I had to stop that for a year because I was afraid one of them would ask me the same question, and I had no idea how I would answer).
I turned forty and realized I would die someday. I started reading some of the master analysts of the human condition—Augustine, Pascal, Ernest Becker, Soren Kierkegaard. I gradually became less of an emotional hermit and ceased regarding myself largely as an academic machine.
It occurred to me at some point during this transition that students are not just academic machines either. They participate in courses with a variety of emotions. They have memories of childhood experiences and past academic life. They want to be recognized by their teachers even if they do not get As. They struggle to become independent yet stay connected to home. They possess convictions about what is important. Most of all, they want to make a life for themselves. If they are persons of faith, they want to explore it or at least keep it intact.
Then one afternoon during the summer after my twenty-first year of teaching, the question hit me: “What do I really want students to get out of courses?”
I promptly got out a piece of paper and wrote down some things. The list of objectives grew to thirteen. I wanted students to become more imaginative, more adventuresome, and more courageous to take risks. I wanted them to develop a passion for learning while maintaining habits of self-discipline. I wanted them to become used to thinking for themselves and to make the Christian faith their own. I also wanted them to become more ready to die.
I put all of these objectives into the syllabus for the next semester, varying them some for each course. When I read the list during the first class period of Introduction to Philosophy (which I did with some trepidation), a few of the students snickered and several others smiled when I got to “To prepare you for dying.”
One of them asked about that one. I responded by saying I wasn’t sure how it would work and that maybe it would have to be one of the course’s mysteries.
My sense was that the other objectives I added were a bit foreign to them as well. I reread the list during the last period of the semester and told the class I would be wildly delighted if they had gotten just one or two of them that semester. They didn’t snicker this time.
From The Life of the Mind: A Christian Perspective (Baker Academic, 2002), 43–44.
Remembering Twenty-Five Years of Extra-Curricular Teaching
Dave rushed into my office
One afternoon in 1987 or thereabouts,
Distressed and talking fast.
For thirty-five minutes I listened
As his words came tumbling out.
He left as abruptly as he came,
Saying how much better he now felt.
I smiled, but was mystified
As I had said only eight words
(Which I had counted as he talked).
Kendra stopped by my office two days ago
To talk about what she could do with her life.
She is telling her brother she could be a lawyer,
But that’s only to mollify him
For teasing her for taking philosophy courses.
When I said that she could be a college professor,
She said, “Yes!” in an uncharacteristically
Enthusiastic voice.
Tom has my old, big, black
Underwood typewriter
On permanent loan.
I wrote my first book on that typewriter,
Cutting and pasting with scissors and glue.
Tom is working on his second Ph.D. at
Harvard Divinity School.
His birthday is this coming Tuesday, October 10.
I will call him, and we will talk
For our usual hour or hour and a half.
Colleen and I used to talk on the phone now and then,
But she has not replied to my last e-letter,
Sent on March 18, her 42nd birthday.
She and Monte and Ellen, an unlikely group,
Met with me in the cafeteria once a week
To talk about issues.
At the end of the year—1985—
I took them to Denny’s for ice cream.
When we came back, we went into Johnson Hall Lounge
Where Ellen played the Pooh song on the piano
(The sheet music for which Colleen had brought along),
And we all four sang it,
Monte a little nervously
But Colleen with her typically
Large and expressive smile.
A week ago Friday, I took
Joel and Jesse, Valerie and Naomi,
To Caribou Coffee in Vernon Hills.
They ordered coffee,
While Randy, the worker there,
Made me a cup of apple cider
Without sugar but with a shot of cinnamon.
We five talked, then colored in my
Pooh coloring books.
Valerie said, or maybe it was I,
“We could dance out in the parking lot.”
So we did, with the car door wide open,
To the tune of 19th century western New York dance music,
A tape of which I keep in the car for such occasions.
Now they all want to take
An independent study course next semester—
The philosophy of dancing—
Which I may give them
If the dean will approve an exception
To the fifty-hour minimum rule.
(They are all freshmen.)
I decided a couple of weeks ago, again,
That I like the teaching life—
The interaction with students
In class and out,
The solitude—
Reading, writing, staring out the window.
I may just get so caught up with it
That, like the history professor in
The fifth Harry Potter book
Who was so busy teaching
That he didn’t notice he had died,
I, too, will keep right on teaching
And not notice when I have died.
I was asked to say a few things at the Trinity College Alumni Banquet on October 7, 2006. I wrote this poem for the occasion. However, the MC forgot to call me to the podium, so the poem was never read.
Sayings of an Old Professor
I
You know you are old when the parents
of your students look young.
But do not think of yourself as old, else you act old.
II
Look for the secret beauty in your disruptive students,
but do not stop meeting out strict discipline to them.
III
Pour your heart into teaching every class.
Then when you have nothing more to give,
treat yourself to some kindnesses.
IV
Welcome your students into your office with a warm smile
and walk out with them as they leave.
V
Interrupt what you are saying every now and then with a story.
So live that you have stories to tell.
VI
If you are not in love with life,
you cannot be in love with teaching.
VII
It is not so much what you say as who you are
that students will remember after they graduate,
if they remember you at all.
© 2024 by Cliff Williams