The Art of Teaching

The Art of Teaching , Jay Parini, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, 2004, 176 pages, $17.95

By: Ben Miles

Jay Parini has blessed pedagogues of all stripes with his most recent book The Art of Teaching . Parini, himself a professor of English at Middlebury College, in Vermont, offers a taut and elegant glimpse into the teacher’s craft.

In five chapters, distributed over a mere 160 pages, Parini’s economic and often poetic use of language provides a plethora of compact lessons for those who are teachers, or for those who aspire to that noble vocation.

In a particularly memorable passage, Parini states that successful teachers he’s known are very much aware that they have to don what he calls a mask when they present themselves as teachers. He maintains that “one must get over the foolish notion that a mask is not ‘authentic,’ that there is something shameful about ‘not being yourself….’ Authenticity is, ultimately, a construction, something invented—much as a suit of clothes will feel authentic, or inauthentic, given the context.”

Quoting poet Pablo Neruda—“myselfs are many”—and evoking Virginia Woolf, who believed that “a biographer is lucky to pin down a half-dozen selves in a good biography,” Parini asserts that a being has thousands of selves, and warns that a beginning teacher needs to try on several masks before finding one that fits.

Parini’s premise is situated in the assumption that the classroom is a type of theater and that the teacher is a performer. In fact, Parini acknowledges that teaching is “a conscious act of self-creation, [a] self-performance.”

Parini shares his thoughts about parallels between the crafts of writing and teaching. Using the example of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, Parini illustrates Heaney’s connection to the impressive poets who preceded him—“the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley, and the compressed, visionary lyricism of William Butler Yeats.” Parini indicates that the mature voice of Heaney has swallowed up and digested these precursors, but they remain a part of him, ingredients of his own voice. It is no stretch, then, when the author writes that the same applies to teaching.

Parini is convincing in his statement that “you learn to teach by listening closely to your own teachers, by taking on their voices, self-consciously or not, by imitating them, digesting them to the point where they become part of your own voice and persona.” The Art of Teaching is more than fluid analogies and instructional metaphors, however. Though not quite a step-by-step handbook for the classroom teacher—it’s a more elegant creation than that—Parini’s work still offers plenty of practical advice for frontline instructors.

For instance, one subsection is titled, “By Their Clothes We Shall Know Them: On Academic Dress.” The contention offered by Parini is that “clothes have their own syntax and vocabularies.” Citing his acquaintance with novelist and Oxford Fellow Iris Murdoch, Parini pegs Murdoch as “the most poorly dressed academic” he ever knew. “She often had dinner at my house,” writes Parini, “and invariably look[ed] disheveled, in a heavy wool skirt and baggy pullover.” Nevertheless, Murdoch’s was an apparently accepted collegiate fashion statement; Parini states that he noticed a lot of female academics dressed quite similarly in Oxford as well as in other academic institutions.

The Art of Teaching is a subtle and moving treatise on a profession that is singularly sublime, as well as essential to the transmission of culture and knowledge. Although the book is aimed mainly at higher educators, everyone who teaches anyone will undoubtedly benefit from Parini’s pedagogical wisdom.