The classroom presentation of the college professor is also highly important. Many a subject is spoiled for a student because of the pedantic, priggish, or solemn manner of the teacher. Many a teacher is devoted to his subject and painstaking, but his lack of knowledge as to the use of incident, epigram, and enticing speech in presenting his subject, prevents his popularity and power as a teacher. Woodrow Wilson says that he had been teaching for twenty years before he discovered that the students forgot his facts, but remembered his stories. We realize that tables of population, weights, and measures, temperatures, birth-rates, and dimensions, are at times necessary, but these should be used in the classroom with moderation.
Too often a teacher takes for granted that he has an uninteresting subject, and therefore gives up the task of making it attractive. A professor of mathematics, endeavoring to evade the obligation for good teaching, gave to a professor of chemistry, whose lecture-room was always crowded with interested students, the following reason for the unpopularity of his subject: “The trouble with mathematics is that nothing ever happens. If, when an equation is solved, it would blow up or give off a bad odor, I should get as many students as you.” The real reason, however, was deeper than the nature of his subject. It lay in the nature of the man. He did not have the power to bring his subject into vital contact with reality and with the life of his students.
The lecture plan also handicaps many a teacher in this important task of getting near the student and drawing him out. The seminar of our larger universities and graduate schools help much in individualizing the students. Students may be talked to death. They themselves often want to talk. An undergraduate in the South, after hearing a professor who was without terminal facilities, told me the old story of Josh Billings, who defined a bore as a man who talked so much about himself that you couldn’t talk about yourself.
In many institutions the students also are forced to take too many lectures. Their minds become jaded. Thinking is the last thing they have power to do in the lecture-room. There is little desire or opportunity for intellectual reaction; as one professor of a Western university humorously remarked:
They do not listen, however attentive or orderly they may be. The bell rings, and a troop of tired-looking boys, followed perhaps by a larger number of meek-eyed girls, file into the classroom, sit down, remove the expressions from their faces, open their note-books on the broad chair-arms, and receive. It is about as inspiring an audience as a room full of phonographs holding up their brass trumpets.
TWO WAYS OF TEACHING HISTORY
The most discouraging moments of my college days occurred during the lecture hours of history, not because I did not have a natural bent for history, but because the professor made the topic, for me, uninteresting. My mind became a blank almost as soon as I entered the classroom. Lecture days in history covered me with a darkness beyond that which I had ever imagined could emanate from the world of fallen spirits. My powers went into eclipse. There seemed to be a kind of automatic cut-off between my brains and my note-book. My only source of comfort consisted in the fact that my miseries had companionship. In some examinations, I remember, only a small remnant of the class succeeded in satisfying the demands of our scholarly teacher.
I can only remember flashes and hints of a long, solemn, student face, shrouded with whiskers, bending with piercing eye over books which seemed only slightly less dry than a remainder biscuit, droning, in “hark-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound” incantation, words, which to our vagrant attention were just words, belonging to remote centuries, while about me my companions shivered audibly, waiting to be called up. The professor was called a great student of history. He might have been. We gladly admitted this: it was the chief compliment we could pay him. As a teacher and inspirer of boys, however, he was a good example of the way to make history impregnable.
A Popular Professor of Chemistry and his Crowded Lecture-Room