I'm curious about how it is that your experience with teaching has been shaped by UC Berkeley itself, and how it's changed over the years. What were, if any, your expectations when you began teaching here and how did the reality match with them? As someone who did a PhD at Stanford and came here from there, I'm wondering if UC Berkeley changed how you thought about teaching.
In retrospect, I was not prepared for the leap into teaching, even though I did a little bit of it at Stanford and before that a little bit in Budapest. But I was not prepared to be a teacher. I went into grad school thinking that I would work as a researcher, which, where I come from, is something that people often do without teaching, and even those who teach often do so on the side. The model of teaching I had in my head was the professor’s internal monologue accidentally overheard by students in the room, basically. That changed at Stanford, of course; but although teaching was theoretically part of our training there, in practice, it was actually a tiny part because we did not have a lot of undergraduates. I remember one time I offered my services as a GSI to a professor in English who was teaching a course on Elizabeth I. In Complit, we were basically free labor. We could just go up to professors and say, “Hey, do you want me to work for you during this semester for your course?” In this case, this particular professor responded, “No.” The reason was that she only had six students in the class. She was just so happy to have those six students and wanted nobody in between them and herself, which is something I am very sympathetic to, in retrospect.
So the circumstances at Stanford helped me to keep this question of the role teaching might play in my life pretty nebulous until I went on the job market. It was only then that I started to realize it wasn’t going to be me in a room thinking about a subject that I'm interested in but, in the best case scenario of actually getting a job, rooms full of students expecting me to teach them something they can care about. I’ll never forget the phone call I ended up getting from Berkeley. The one and only Sam Otter, who was then chair of the English Department, informed that got the job and as he gave me a preview of all the details, he stressed that I could teach basically anything I wanted. And then he added: “except for this next semester, when we would really like you to teach our Shakespeare lecture course.” I don’t think a year has passed since that call without me teaching Shakespeare. The first class I taught my first day at Berkeley was Shakespeare, too; a lecture in front of about 120 students. I'd never done anything like that before. And while walking from Wheeler Hall to the Physics building – the distance is extremely short between Wheeler Hall and Physics, maybe five minutes – I must have stopped at least five times, thinking, no, I don’t want to do this, I just want to go home. I’ll give up this job. I can’t do it, I just want to go home. Not even just to my house, but leave the US. I was terrified.
Like a child going to school for the first time?
Ha, yes! Although I do not remember being this scared when I went to school for the first time. In any case, once you walk into the lecture hall, there’s no room for those invasive thoughts anymore, you just have to do it, to flee forward. I never knew what the next thing out of my mouth would be. What helped almost immediately, though, was the fact that students asked questions and used any kind of pause to say things and make inquiries. This was huge. I thought to myself, oh my God, this could be a conversation! That was a new experience. What happened in that class and what was magical was the fact that the moment I stopped talking, they were eager to say things and ask questions; some logistical, but many of them about things I said or simply about Shakespeare and the plays. Of course, in that first class I also got two questions about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's works. There are certain questions that tend to happen in this context, but some of the questions were about the lecture, and in any event, I was so grateful for any question at all. This was the beginning of a very, very long process of realizing how important, and how helpful for everyone involved it is to go back and forth between lecture and conversation. But it took me many, many years to really figure out how to do that methodically or systematically. At least the motivation was there from the beginning, though. Not the knowledge of how to do that, but the motivation.
“Students probably taught me more during that first semester than I taught them. The main feedback was that 'sometimes you say a couple interesting things but it's way too rushed and we don't have time to discuss them.' The evaluations were an invitation to improve our conversation."
So when you run a lecture now, how is that different in terms of what you learned from the experience you just described?
I felt a vague sense of possibility in the first lecture and in the first semester, but I did not have the energy or the brain space to really think about what that would mean. I was just trying to survive during the first semester, just prepping for lectures. Also, we have these things called evaluations, which are controversial and problematic in so many ways, but I did find them, and have found them ever since quite helpful. This is in part because the students are fairly outspoken but also because they are eager to help instructors who need help. At least that was my experience. And in the first year, when my evaluations were not great - they were kind, they were kind and generous, but also quite explicit in their critiques - they offered a lot of helpful insights. Very basic things: I remember my favorite evaluation from that semester highlighted the fact that (it was a big lecture hall with a pulpit sort of structure in the middle of it) I always walked only to the right of the pulpit and never to the left. And a person who was apparently sitting on the left side of the lecture hall seemed offended: “Why don't you ever walk in our direction? This is not fair. And you should really think about how you use space in the classroom.” There were other evals with much harsher things to say, of course; the point is that students probably taught me more during that first semester than I taught them. The main feedback was that “sometimes you say a couple of interesting things but it's way too rushed and we don't have time to discuss them.” The evaluations were an invitation to improve our conversation. In the forthcoming years, I worked more consciously on these problems.
But the game changer was the pandemic, specifically that crazy first semester when we had to move online with a week's notice. Like many, I was incredibly anxious, but I was very lucky to have two great GSIs for the medieval and renaissance survey course. We had a conversation about how we could make this a little more bearable, perhaps even fun, both for the students and ourselves. All we knew at that point was that we would all be sitting behind a computer for the foreseeable future. At first, we thought, “maybe we could do a podcast kind of thing? Just have a conversation?” But then we landed on a plan: I would circulate lecture notes in advance of the lecture, and then ask students to post their thoughts and comments on the text that we are reading for the given lecture, as well as any questions about the lecture itself. And I would lecture in response to those questions and comments. Basically, lectures were as much about the comments as they were about the readings. This meant doubling the work - now I was writing basically an extra lecture for every class. However, because of these online comments, by the time I entered the lecture hall, the conversation had already started; like the reader of a Donne poem, I just had to join it.
Is there a relationship between the way you’ve thought about the concept of “attention” in your scholarship and the way you’ve thought about it in pedagogical or teaching contexts?
There should have been. The reason I can't just simply confirm that that is the case is because I'd done most of the research for that book on attention in prayer and poetry before coming to Berkeley and there wasn’t a whole lot that I changed about the argument afterwards. But writing that book was perhaps not a bad way to prepare for teaching. There were a lot of discoveries in the process, but the one that stands out to me still today is the idea of attending to something or someone as a way or mode of knowing them. Sounds like a such a simple idea, I know, but to me it was a big discovery: that there are many different ways of knowing and one of them is not analytical or prepositional or anything of the sort but simply a matter of attending. It does get more complicated afterwards, once you start thinking about what kind of attention this requires. But at this basic level, the book’s main insight has in fact translated into my experience of teaching. Oftentimes we think of attention as a mere condition of learning. Once you realize that attention is a way of thinking and knowing, it’s no longer just that, not just a condition but an actual goal.
“...attending may be a way of thinking something, as a way of maybe even understanding something at the level of allowing them to become present for you and creating the conditions under which you can become present to them. It’s not easy for this to happen in the classroom but when it does, I feel pretty happy to have witnessed it."
In an undergraduate seminar, what is the difference between leading students to not just give their attention, but attend to things? What does that mean in a concrete sense?
I guess I would want to draw a contrast or at least a comparison between various ways in which we think about thinking and knowing. Like critical thinking or interpretation, hermeneutics, close reading itself, right? Attention is an aspect of all of those things but oftentimes it is taken for granted or is thought of as a condition for them. This is changing today, especially since the beginning of the pandemic, there’s so much talk about the crisis of attention that the act of attending itself is getting some attention. But still: if you asked somebody: what is the relationship between attention and interpretation? They would probably just say, well, attention is the condition of interpretation. You have to first attend to a text in order to then make sense of it. And I think what I'm trying to say is “what about attention itself?” When I worked on that first book, I learned that some monks and theologians thought that prayer was ultimately theology because attending in prayer was a way towards attending to God. The idea is that attending may be a way of thinking something, as a way of maybe even understanding something at the level of allowing them to become present for you and creating the conditions under which you can become present to them. It’s not easy for this to happen in the classroom but when it does, I feel pretty happy to have witnessed it.
