Which Teachers Are You Channeling?

One of the enjoyable things about guesting on this blog is that I get to share space with Rob Howse, who has no particular reason to remember me.   I was one of any number of students who took a course with him at the University of Toronto's law faculty before he (and I) headed south.  (In my case, it was to warmer climes.  I'm not sure RH gets to make the same claim.)

This happy coincidence has me thinking about one of the great joys of entering teaching.   The law, in particular, is a backward-looking profession, in many respects, and one of the pleasures of teaching is that you get to keep faith with those who have taught you.  I take some pleasure when I teach Con Law in knowing that I took the course from Louis Henkin at Columbia, who in turn clerked for Frankfurter and Learned Hand, who in turn knew Holmes, who in his turn, when a child, if recollection serves, met at least one of the founding fathers.  So, in this way, we pass on to our students some connection, however reduced over time, to the past, and impress on them their place in one branch of the great chain of being.  (I also took constitutional law in Canada, and am thus, I suppose, related by far greater levels of propinquity to the framers of the Canada Act, 1982, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  Funny that I'm not more struck by those connections.  It's not just a Canadian thing, I think; it's that the more distant our connection to the past, the more likely we are to overlook the petty flaws and say, "Those were giants.")

Similarly, in teaching one gets to pay tribute to one's own teachers by emulating them.  After all, what other training in teaching do most legal academics have?  In my case, the foremost examples are all from Columbia, and all exhibit different traits of the ideal teacher.  John Manning, who has since decamped for Harvard, taught me about enthusiasm, which is an essential tool in the large classroom (helped, in his case, by quarts of Mountain Dew).  Mike Dorf taught (and teaches) me much about generosity, the capacity not only to inspire by enthusiasm but to fulfill the duty to be enthusiastic in advising and championing one's students.  And Kent Greenawalt taught me a surprisingly difficult skill: that of listening.  Socratic lecturing and seminar teaching both count on interaction with students.  Yet, as new teachers find, often one is so focused on where the material is going next that Socratic lecturing is a mere dumb show, in which you take comments until someone says what you want to go where you need to be next.  A couple of years of teaching has taught me the difficulty of really simply listening to a student, and responding respectfully and thoughtfully, without regard for the direction of the class.  I think it's difficult to do this right until you've really road-tested your classes and mastered the material.  I hasten to say that these three graces did not embody only these individual virtues.  But on those rare occasions when I manage to do something right in or out of the classroom, it's pleasing to consider that I'm repaying a profound debt to them in one of the few ways I can. 

            

So, who do you intend to favor with the sincerest form of flattery when you hit the classroom next year?  This is one of those few times, I think, when shameless flattery is highly appropriate, and I am always curious to hear which scholars are also role models in the classroom.  (I'm doubly curious about the converse, but I won't ask...)

P.S.  Why are none of these models from Toronto, my alma mater?  Not the quality of the teaching, certainly; Toronto was a terrific school, and I had some wonderful teachers.  Perhaps because teaching there was even further from the Socratic model than at most American law schools.  Or perhaps because my own schema invariably associate America with a certain kind of energy.