Hugo Schwyzer

As my students know, I don’t lecture from notes. When I’m teaching a new class, or one I haven’t taught in a while, I’ll show up with a few specific facts or dates scribbled on the back of an envelope, but nothing more. When I first started giving lectures as a TA (lecturing as a TA was very common at UCLA) in 1991, I wrote out my lectures in longhand; that quickly proved both tedious and unnecessary. By the time I came to Pasadena City College two years later, I wrote out bullet points for myself on lined yellow paper, but not complete sentences; the last time I used those legal pads to prompt myself was perhaps 1995.

I continue to “read in my field”, as it were. I’m a medievalist by formal training, but don’t teach my subject here at the community college level. Here, I’m a generalist, offering lectures on Hammurabi and Homer, the reign of Charles II, Puritan notions of the erotic, the First World War, the rise of the gay rights movement in 1950s Los Angeles and the theme of dysfunctional families in western literature. It would not be entirely uncharitable to describe my interests as running a mile wide and an inch deep; teaching survey courses in umpteen different subjects is much more appealing to me than taking one or two areas and exploring them in painstaking detail. And so my reading lists are eclectic as I struggle to stay somewhat current in so many different fascinating fields. The ever-growing horde of books unread might be depressing if I allowed myself time to reflect upon all that I still do not know!

In any case, my lectures today are, of course, stored only in my head. And the material for those lectures, particularly in the Western Civ classes I’ve been teaching in one form or another since 1991, gets added to on a regular basis. The problem is, I no longer have much sense of which source informed which aspect of my lecture. My lectures have many ancestors — books I read as an undergrad, other lectures I’ve heard, journal articles I read two summers ago. I take new bits of information and stick them on, ripping off old pieces as I do so; the lectures are similar year to year but I never give the same one twice. And this means that when a students asks, as one recently did, where I got a certain slant on a story (not a specific, easy-to-look-up fact, but an interpretation), I was at a complete loss. Had my lectures come from one or two books read long ago, it would be easy to answer — but they come from a hundred sources or more, skimmed and mined for anecdotes over the course of nearly two decades. Bottom line: I have no idea anymore where some of my material comes from.

At times in recent years, I’ve had to spend precious hours combing through old books, looking for the source of one particular story I’ve told. Sometimes, I worry that I might have simply made something up, not out of a conscious effort to disguise my ignorance or a desire to deceive, but perhaps because it made more “sense.” Those of us who are generalists tend, like screenwriters, to love a good narrative — and when there are factual awkwardnesses that stand in the way of how we want to construct our story, we are tempted to elide them, or make them disappear altogether. My dissertation adviser, Scott Waugh told me when I asked him for advice on how to structure a Western Civ survey, “Don’t lie.” He said it with a wink, which meant (as he later repeated in a teaching seminar) that survey courses required some discretionary fudging; otherwise, the class would remain bogged down in overwhelming and bewildering detail.

I first lectured on the rise of the Roman Republic in April 1991. Since then, the name “Tiberius Gracchus”, for example, has passed from my lips every term without fail. Year after year, I tell the same story of the murder of the Gracchi brothers and the beginning of the transition to Empire. In some years, I’ll give that lecture seven or eight times. Many of these lectures, therefore, have been given well over 120 times. And in each one, I add something on and take something else away. I learn new things and, sad to say, forget old ones. I’d like to think the lectures now are richer than the ones I gave in my mid-twenties. But at least back then, I had some sense of what the sources were for each story I told. Now, alas, it’s all gotten gloriously muddled.

Perhaps this is part of being a Gemini and an ENFP with a background in the theater.

Still, I ought to do better, and resolve to spend some more of my non-existent down time looking up the origins of some of my old stories.