Hugo Schwyzer

This week I’ve had a couple of conversations about teaching which have dovetailed nicely together. A junior colleague asked me what I’d learned since I first started here fourteen years ago; later that same day, a student whom I mentor asked a not dissimilar question.

I teach very differently than I did when I first arrived at Pasadena City College in 1993. I have considerably more confidence, and — possibly — a deeper knowledge of the material. When I first started teaching Western Civ, I often had only the barest, thumbnail grasp of what it was I was covering in my lectures. Like so many other novice professors, I was frequently just one step ahead of my students. Experience and background reading have gradually filled in most of the lacunae, but every once in a while I still find myself lecturing on a topic about which I don’t know nearly as much as I would like. (For example, the Napoleonic Wars.)

But on a psychological level, the real change is measured by the diminishing degree to which I pander to my students in order to be liked and admired. I don’t know if those of us who are predisposed to narcissism are naturally drawn to the teaching profession, but in my case, my need for validation and my career aspirations meshed together nicely from the beginning. Hugo Schwyzer at 26 (the age at which I began my career here at the college) was an insecure bundle of nerves and desires. I was already a fairly polished speaker, but that polish was the result of the assiduous cultivation of qualities that I knew could get me the attention I craved so much.

Of course, I love Clio, and my romance with the muse of history is rooted in something deeper than my own self-regard. Even at my most anxious and self-absorbed, the excitement I brought to my lectures was not entirely feigned! I loved the material as much as I loved the act of teaching, and I loved both only a little more than I loved my students themselves. Over time, my love for my students and my love for the subject has grown, while — oh great blessings of age — my insecurity has gradually diminished. The need for applause, while far from entirely gone, has grown far less urgent.

When I began to teach, I cared as much what my students thought about me as I did about what it was they were learning; to be fair, at times in my early career the former was more important. I — and my students — may well have been the worse for it. I always got excellent evaluations, but suspected that those were due more to my skill as a performer than to my ability to truly teach. (Of course, almost everyone gets excellent evaluations these days, as I posted earlier this month.)

My classes average 40-50 students each. Experience and feedback of one sort or another have taught me that in a class of forty, by the end of the semester I will be adored by approximately five, hated by that same number, and the remaining thirty will be somewhere on the spectrum that runs between mild appreciation and low-grade dislike. One or two will have crushes on me (or, more accurately, what I represent). One or two, on the other hand, will develop an equally intense antipathy towards me. Just as the crush is usually not on Hugo but on what I inspire, so too its opposite is less about my teaching and more about what I trigger inside certain people. What some people call charisma, others call pompousness. What some people see as passion, others see as insufferable arrogance. And some students are going to see me as a father figure — which means that how they respond to me will have less to do with me than with their own feelings about their actual dads.

I’ve come to understand that I am not as wonderful as those few who adore me imagine. I am not as wretched and unpleasant as that same number who loathe me believe. More importantly, my responsibility to teach enthusiastically and with purpose cannot be affected by the emotional responses I engender in a few. If I alter my style to seek praise, I err. If I frantically do all that I can to make those who will never like me change their minds, I make an even greater mistake. Some will love me, some will hate me, and the mass majority will feel varying degrees of indifference, wondering (rightly) only what it is that I as their professor can do for them. This was true when I was 26 and a rookie, and it is true today as I approach 41 as a tenured veteran with more than 10,000 students taught. The difference is that my ability to be at peace with the truth that I will be loved, loathed, and — by many — ignored is far greater today than it was when I started.

And that is a good thing to learn.