Teaching and Learning

Once upon a time a friend of mine while serving as a graduate assistant grader at Harvard received a paper from the demonstrably brightest kid in his section on the nominal subject of the common varieties of critical response to some one of the plays of Euripides, I now forget which.  In this paper the student had constructed a drama which took place in the “green room” of the theater where Euripides’ play was being produced for the first time.  Ignore, of course, the temporal incongruity--a modern day theater as substitute for the ancient Athenian amphitheater, indeed the presence of the retiring room where professionals might be found at intermission.  Concentrate instead on the drama in which a number of critics argued bitchily and proprietarily over their assessments of Euripides’ play.  The student had caught perfectly the linguistic and intellectual habits of the members of the Harvard classics department, had suggested in this collocation that they stood in for the variety of mainstream criticism.  The paper was an eccentric intellectual tour de force that only a truly sympathetic reader could have appreciated.  How would the remote control online grader/reader in the MOOCs course being proposed as the salvation of American education have responded to something like that, if indeed it was a human being and not a computer reading the offering?  Or what would be the on-line computerized reaction to the very bright, very eccentric Boston University student who gave me his paper one day late which he brought to my office on a tray carefully folded to fit between the top and bottom of a hamburger bun sitting on a plate between three milkshakes, one red, one white, one blue, to celebrate the impending bicentennial celebration the following week?  How would the computer course coordinators have dealt with my surprise appearance in a 100 person lecture course in a New Hampshire college classroom where I was scheduled to give a major endowed lecture that evening at the moment when the class was starting their reading of Euripides’ Medea, and I, asked to say a few words off the top of my head, gave one of the most impassioned assessments and interpretations of that play that ever occurred to me, which fifty minutes later ended and after a moment of astounded silence on the part of the teacher, the students, not to mention the impromptu speaker, was rewarded with a standing ovation and bursts of cheering?  What about the extraordinary difference in classroom behaviors in an ordinary freshman class at Lehman College up in the Bronx where the students are still getting around to understanding that a high school class where the object is to defy and upset the teacher is not going to happen at the university where the gravitas and knowledge of the professor demands an intellectual obedience which translates itself immediately into a certain adult behavior and posture in the classroom?  They only get beaten into shape, as it were, by the harsh questions tossed at them by the professor, by his hauteur, his froideur, his insolent disparaging of their ignorant responses.  They learn that adult intellectual life is not a joke, not a game, that learning demands constant respect as they had never seen before.  The computer does not teach that.