Keeping a certain youthful enthusiasm or undergraduate idiosyncrasy is difficult when you’re contending with day care colds, spirit-rending administrative work, worries about the state of the world and the future, or simply the kind of routinized structures that bear the weight of bourgeois life. Being a good teacher requires being sort of odd, even a bit immature. Some of my favorite professors married scholarly expertise with considerable eccentricity — my dissertation adviser insisted her students take up social dance like polka, line-dancing and zydeco; another of my former professors would alight at 4 a.m. to teach himself Japanese, before undertaking woodworking projects like making a life-size chess set. The passions are nonconformist. To be moved is to be a little bit weird.
What I discovered anew in my encounter with “The Brothers Karamazov” last term was that if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien — let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too. Return to the basics. Cut through the haze of abstraction, the webs of scholarly terminology, the pretense of professionalization, and attempt to recover the basic human experiences that can move us. Remain a student in earnest.
Near the end of “The Brothers Karamazov,” the novel’s hero, the youngest Karamazov, Alyosha, is trying to win over an intelligent boy named Kolya, who confuses skepticism with maturity. Alyosha’s passionate appeal doesn’t involve rhetorical fireworks or hysterics. Instead, he takes the young man very seriously. He treats him like an adult. We forget, at our peril, how life-changing it can be for a young person to have an unrelated adult treat them with seriousness and respect. Alyosha is present to Kolya, and painfully earnest. For the most part, he asks questions rather than gives speeches. And eventually Kolya can’t deny that there is something about “Karamazov,” abandoning his prematurely world-weary cynicism for a more expansive embrace of life.
As educators the world over look toward the coming school year, perhaps, with a hint of dread, we should focus on what we can control. The challenges of our algorithmic age are real, but it has always been true that good teachers need to be exemplary students to help others learn. For Dostoyevsky, worldly common sense can make us unwitting fools. As Alyosha memorably notes, all capable people “are awfully afraid of looking ridiculous, and it makes them unhappy.” Remaining a passionate student yourself may well feel ridiculous, nowadays, but it is ultimately nothing more than realism about what education requires.
