As of this past Saturday, July 3rd, I have completed my first teaching assignment. This job was not one where I lead discussion groups on modal logic or an Introduction to Philosophy class filled with indifferent and frequently absentee freshmen, rather, it was a summer class filled with 19 rising 14-16 year-olds. These kids are also the top 25% of the top 1% of PSAT takers. In other words, these kids are crazy smart. If I were to ask for a better group of students to begin my teaching career with, I suggest that I could not find anyone else. Even now, after an exhausting 3 weeks of living off of too little sleep, too much caffeine, and ample amounts of sun, I miss them a lot and wish I got to see them next term.
I have often thought of the life of teaching as something one is called to and rarely, on my better days, I've thought of it as a gift. Every day I woke up here in Durham I was reminded that getting to share in the lives of students is one of the highest of blessings and that it should be treated as such. I was reminded at every turn that this shared life of the mind is not a right; it is a privilege. I get the privilege of discussing some of the most interesting and important ideas in the history of the world with some of the brightest and funniest people I have ever met. It is a gift, always a gift, and should be treated as such.
Shedding such sentimental thoughts for a while, I figure I ought to talk about how much these kids and this experience has transformed the way I think about education and about philosophy as a whole. The first thing I should say is that they love to re-name things. For example, we philosophers refer to Plato's ideal world as the intelligible world. My students, however, took to referring to it as "the ness world", as in "where chairness lives". They also became obsessed with two meme-like things. First, they loved to make the whale noises from the beginning of the Carl Sagan youtube song "A Still More Glorious Dawn". When the class would get quiet I could always count on somebody to throw in a "whoop!, uhhhh". Secondly, they loved loved loved Kant puns. I took to writing their names on a quasi-fictional "no-no list" for excessive Kant puns. I also took to having them bribe my exceptionally awesome TA Peter and me with epically awesome imagined things. Such bribes included a snowblower powerful enough to move the island from Lost to a different location and Immanuel Kant brought to the future and forced to wear Peter's ever-present teal running shorts and carrying crumbly cookies from our dinning commons (the very reward I promised to those kids who won games we played).
On a more serious note, these students drew from so many more sources than I had ever thought high school kids would know. I had one student who made a connection between the Heraclitean idea of time and Einstein's special and general Relativity. This same student wrote a fantastic paper on the way that synaesthesia effects human perception and in particular our conceptions of temporality. I had another student write a paper that would get an A in a college philosophy class and she was only 16. They were exceptionally bright kids, and I can't gush over how wonderful they were enough.
After about a week of working with them I began thinking about two things. First, how do I get back to such a great environment as the Duke East TIP campus? This environment is one where I had great bosses, great colleagues, and exceptional students. Who wouldn't want to work in such an environment? Secondly, how do I get to the kind of school where I can teach these kids in college? That's the harder question to work through than the first one because it entails rethinking my ideas concerning higher education. Do I enter the gates of the walled city in order to get to teach them? How much of their exceptional qualities are the result of economic advantages? What about those kids who can't afford to come to TIP but are still just as exceptional? It also might entail thinking how "East Jesus Nowhere" becomes a place for the best and brightest and what such a reimagining of higher ed might mean.
Finally, I'd like to say a word about a subtle reminder of the deficiencies of the academy in light of this amazing experience. At both BC and SIUC, the Philosophy Department seems cut off from other areas of the academy. It is very easy to get so wrapped up in my own discipline that it becomes the only think I can talk about. Yet here, amongst a sea of English and Literature grad students, I was reminded about what it means to collaborate with others. I was reminded that, just as was the case with Socrates, knowing myself and my discipline meant knowing my limits be they personal or philosophic. I got to talk with medievalist who discussed time and eternity in Augustine and Aquinas, modernists who talked about eschatology in popular culture, and played a lot of Tetris against some truly formidable English, Music, History, Economics, and Computer Science guys. Its very hard being an introvert and also being in an insular discipline. Not that philosophy is the only insular discipline, nor that the academy as a whole isn't insular. What I am trying to say is that a defensive stance is not always the best stance to take regarding other disciplines. In a wonderful conversation I had with a TA from UNC, we discussed how we look for different things in the great texts of Heidegger, Derrida, and Sartre. We talked about how hard it is to be taken seriously and to take others seriously in the graduate environment. We also agreed that such closed-off stances are foolish. Collaboration and experimentation was pushed here at TIP and I hope to bring such an attitude to my other environments be they academic or otherwise.
The life philosophic as well as the life academic is a gift and it ought to be treated as such. After just a single month, this is the best summer I've had in years and I'm so thankful for the opportunity to be a participant in such a great program. I told my kids that this is not a summer-survival job but this is a dream fulfillment job. I rarely say truer things than that.
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