Most of the linguists I know have day jobs as teachers at universities and colleges to support their habits of research and writing. I spent a little over forty years in the classroom, first as a junior high English teacher, then six years teaching linguistics to undergrads, and the rest of the years struggling to help grad students become linguists. Shifting briefly into the Rumsfeldian mode, was it satisfying? Certainly. Was I successful? Hardly. Do I feel good now that it's over? You bet, although it's never really "over." Teaching goes on and on, as illustrated by a recent article in the New York Times (see here).
This article tells us about a CCNY political scientist, Stanley
Feingold, now 80 and long since retired, who keeps on keeping on. He
doesn't teach in the classroom anymore but his former students still
seek his counsel. Well, five times a year anyway at their luncheons in
New York, when they get him to fly from his home in Seattle to hold
still more seminars with their honored professor. Really neat, huh?
Looking back now, I find that I absorbed most of my own learning from
professors in whose classrooms I never had the opportunity to sit.
Their books and articles, papers given at conferences, correspondence,
and informal discussions did the job for me. Often it wasn't the
linguistic content that mattered most. It was their attitude, their
excitement, their advice, and their ways of expressing ideas. I've
never met Professor Feingold but I'll bet that he must have been one of
those who could communicate these qualities exceptionally well.
In today's world we honor publication and research (as we should, of
course) but we don't usually think about the other kind of
teaching we got, which is often the major cause of how we got where we
are. Information sources are now abounding but attitude, advice, and
encouragement comes from good teachers, giving hope for the importance
of teaching and the continuing future of the classroom setting. I can
list my own examples of linguistics teachers who made right-angle
turns in my life. Most of us can, if we take the time to think about
it.
I disagree, however, with Professor Feingold's regrets about choosing
teaching as his career. He says that his decision to be a teacher was a
mistake because, in his words, "I know of no other profession where
your on-the-job performance counts so little." Maybe that's because we
do an inadequate job of measuring on-the-job performance in our
universities. It does count, but it's not always recognizable in the
standard course evaluation forms collected at the end of a term.
On-the-job performance might be better measured by the way students'
lives are changed. And as for what the teacher gets out of it, as
Professor Feingold puts it, "teaching is cheaper than therapy."