Personal Essays on the Scholarship of Teaching

Thomas F. X. Noble, Corcoran Department of History
Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award, 1999
Harrison Award for Academic Advising, 1999

I am a medievalist by training and by inclination. I did not come to medieval studies because of Chaucer's clerk of Oxenford, but I recognized a kindred spirit when long ago I heard him say, "Gladly would I learn, and gladly teach." Later I encountered the same idea in the Epistolae Morales attributed to Seneca: "I love to learn in order that I might teach; and I get no joy from learning anything if I alone am to know about it." As long as I can remember I have had a keen desire to study the Middle Ages, but for an almost equally long time I have had a passion to teach, to share, to explain what I have learned.

Teaching is my vocation, not my job. I cannot remember a time when I did not want to teach. I have never complained that teaching takes me away from my research. In the world that I teach and study, men and women were not ashamed to say they were called to certain ways of life. In our cynical and secular world such notions seem naive. Nevertheless, I can say with some assurance that teaching is my calling.

Teaching is also my profession. By this I do not mean that teaching is how I earn my living but that teaching lays rigorous ethical demands on me. For example, in twenty-three years I have never once "winged" a class. I craft my lectures as carefully as I can and deliver them with all the power and inspiration I can muster. I take every student seriously; often indeed I take them more seriously than they take themselves. In small, discussion-oriented classes I try to create a safe, welcoming environment where students are encouraged to speak freely, and to criticize me and one another constructively.

Seneca and the clerk began with learning. So do I. Only through constant study do I gain the knowledge that permits me to enter the classroom with confidence that I have something worthwhile to say. Study, viewed as preparation, is hard and lonely work. The great musician or athlete spends many more hours practicing than performing and so, I believe, it must be with teachers. I derive great satisfaction from the fact that I teach in a research university. This community of scholars places high demands on its members. Those demands relate to my teaching in this way: I feel a strong obligation to take my students right to the frontiers of knowledge in my field. I think I know why Seneca and the clerk liked both to learn and to teach. To them, and to me, teaching is a way of explaining, of coming to know more deeply, of achieving understanding. Learning and teaching are each incomplete without the other.

I am a historian. What I teach is in small ways wrapped up in details and in large ways wrapped up in explanations. Imagine five piles of bricks, five architects, and five completely different brick buildings. Now think of those bricks as facts, of those architects as historians, and of those buildings as interpretations. Here is where the teacher goes to work-explaining explanation, interpreting interpretation. As I teach history I think, at least I hope, I can help students to think more expansively, more creatively, more sympathetically. I also hope that I can leave students with notions and perceptions that will be increasingly valuable to them as they go through life. I deliberately use concrete examples to teach the difference between celebrity and distinction, between values and virtues, between faith and credulity, or between individual self-interest and the common good.

What has been learned and understood must also be communicated. I have spent years polishing my efforts at classroom communication, largely through the lecture method. An important part of my work as a teacher consists of helping students to express what they have learned in effective classroom discussion and in polished prose exposition. I demand a lot of writing and that writing demands of me a lot of reading and commenting. I do not resent this because, again, it is one of those professional burdens that I necessarily, but willingly, assume. It also gives me great pleasure to see my students improve and to see their confidence grow, not because of cheerleading on my part but because of discernible achievement.

So I love to learn and to teach, and I try to instill or to cultivate in others a desire to learn, and, if not exactly to teach, then at least to communicate. I try, in the end, to get students to share my simple belief that a life enriched by the Bible, or Homer, or Augustine, or Dante is richer than a life absent of these treasures.