A (4:10)
Well, it requires, believe it or not, doing a discussion class in some way requires a different kind of preparation than it does giving a lecture. I'm actually a very poor lecturer. I have to give lectures occasionally for papers and things like that. And, you know, it's just not something. It doesn't reflect the way I think. So part of it is just the way teaching is. Is. Is. Is a reflection of the way I go about thinking myself. And to some extent. And what I do is I take the text and I literally sort of map it out. I try to see the shape of the argument. It's a very kind of visual thing. And I've got diagrams and all sorts of things like that in my notes, and then just various passages to refer to. And what I like to do is to, you know, begin by asking some questions of the students, mostly just to find out what they made of the text. Because you always have to start from where the students are. And so you sort of find out did they understand it, how did they understand it, how did they misunderstand it? And of course, usually all of us begin, usually misunderstanding, speaking from my own experience. And then you come up against the fact of your misunderstanding, can't explain other things in the text. So you have to go back and start over. But what I like to do is ask, find out where they are and, you know, and almost always where they're at isn't exactly probably on point. Maybe it is. Hasn't happened to me yet. But how you're going to move them depends on where they are. So, for example, if you have a map and I'm. I don't know, I'm in. I'm in Denver, and. And I want to Give someone's instructions how to get to Kansas City. Right. I'm going to tell them to go east, pretty much just straight east. Right. But if it turns out we want to go to Albuquerque or they want to get to Kansas City, but they're in Chicago, well, you have to go south. Right. And so students often. I had one very funny student, quite a good student, came to me at the end of his, his undergraduate career and said, you know, I started keeping track. And whenever you asked a student a question that was sort of, you know, X or Y, if they said X, it turned out to be y, like 100% of the time, he said, I don't understand how that's possible. It should be about 50, 50. In which I said, well, you know, it didn't matter what they were going to say. We were going to go the opposite direction in a certain sense. Right. Whatever. And, and, and, and I do that partly just to sort of, you know, because usually, you know, nobody ever gets the XY coordinate right on the spot usually. And I'm not even always altogether sure where the XY coordinate is. But, you know, and I think that, you know, sort of showing them, you know, there's different ways of approaching it, different ways of looking at it, that that is a, A good way or sort of showing them somehow there's something a little bit inadequate about whatever they. Their starting point is. Right. And I think that's just the experience all of us should have when reading. And reading is trying to not necessarily fill ourselves with information, although that's very important. And the whole classical school movement, I think one of the most important things about it is, particularly in the early grades, right. It gives over a huge amount of time and energy to memorization. I think that's incredible. That was completely lacking from my own education. I still have a hard time doing it. When I teach other students to memorize, I'm sure they do the assignment in about 10 minutes. Takes me like a half an hour to make sure I've got the poem memory or even longer. Right. And then they remember it for like, you know, who knows how long or six months later. I'm like, well, I gotta go back and refresh myself because I'm old and my memory just doesn't work the same way. But I'm talking a little bit more about which do with students, you know, sort of from 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th grade in the high school level. And I think it's important. And one of the good things about the classical school movement is it sort of makes the distinction between the approach that you take has to be appropriate to the. To the students you're teaching. But what it's really about is, you know, as Plato says in the Republic. And so this is a. This is a educational heresy that's been around for a long time. And it's a heresy because it's not far from the truth, but it's not the whole truth. And that is that education is sort of transfer of knowledge and living in a digital age where everything is zooming over the Internet and transferring and downloading and uploading and people thinking of their brains as their. If they're computers, which of course, they're not. That image of education is very powerful. You get people who say, well, who needs a College? I've got YouTube, and I have some sympathy for that point of view, but it doesn't capture the experience you have of having your soul, as Plato says, turned around. Now you need the information to turn it around. But just because you've got the information doesn't mean your soul's going to be turned around. And it's that turning around experience that I tried to sort of reproduce in the students, and particularly nice about it is to show them what's sort of lacking in their understanding and then why they didn't see something that oftentimes turns out to be pretty clear in the text. And that's. I. I had teachers who were masters at doing this. I was a student of Alan Bloom. I don't teach at all like Alan Bloom did. He gave these masterful lectures. He could just talk off the, you know, off the cuff, go off on digressions that were all very coherent and. And tie it all together and speak in a very beautiful, moving way. The teacher I kind of was, in some ways most influenced by was a historian named Carl Weintraub. And he came in and he just, like, grilled us on. And it was a history class. So partly it was just knowing what was actually going on, and then secondarily, in a certain sense, you know, knowing the facts and figures and then thinking about it. But the thing that happened with, when I took this class with. With Mr. Weintraub was I found myself in the library and reading this stuff and thinking, why does. It just gave me a better sense of if I didn't really understand something, I had to go back over it. And always sort of hovering over behind me in the library was Professor Weintraub's head saying, yes, Mr. Nadan, that's fine, but what does that actually mean? Right? And Having that sort of prod or someone sort of looking over my shoulder, I found to be very helpful. And so in a way, I sort of try to do that with my students as well.