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Elliott Coleman (1906-1980)
Now that I am retired people sometimes ask me if I have fallen into the "black hole" said to await those suddenly deprived of the pricks and kicks of wage slavery. No, I answer, I am quite happy to be out of the black hole of academia (see "Homunculus Academicus" ), and I think I got out just in time. My teaching methodology would not have survived the reforms that have taken over German (and European) universities in the past few years. I would have to give a lot more tests and grades, correct more papers, and generally make life more difficult for both my students and myself. "What," my colleagues (and inevitably the students too) would begin to complain, "all you do is talk?" (Not true; we also sang a lot.) This would come from the same stone-headed pedants whose wisdom (e.g., "Never say gotten," "Never start a sentence with but or because," "Never use contractions or the first person in a formal essay") I was able to deconstruct with relative impunity, and whose incessant cries for "More grammar!" and more translation and pronunciation exercises (this for students in their 10th+ year of English!) I was able largely to ignore. I'm afraid it is precisely these intellectual maggots who will thrive and prevail in the "reform," that is, rigor mortis, of the curriculum.
Ok, I do sometimes miss the students. What aging pedagogue would not miss the company of forever young, predominately female students, especially in the spring semester when they begin to shed the accouterments of a long German winter? To misquote Robert Frost, "One could do worse than be an admirer of young birches." To put it less lasciviously, I sometimes miss the "talk" -- and can I help it if the women do it better than men?
My methodology was so simple that I expect to see it spun someday into a multi-volume work that will in turn spawn hundreds of scholarly journals, textbooks, lectures, seminars, conferences, etc. Surely an impressively latinate appellation will be found for letting people do whatever the f* they like. "Laisser faire" doesn't quite cut it because I did not in fact let them do anything they wanted to. I didn't want to hear interminable summaries of the latest Harry Potter novel or movies, for example. But this didn't require explicit prohibitions. All I had to do was ask them, "Why are you telling us about this?" This always stopped them in their tracks. They were used to talking in English for no purpose other than to talk in English. If any actual thought or ideas were involved, they were the ones predestined and pre-chewed by the teacher or the textbook for their consumption and endless further rumination. I wanted them to find things they were interested in and talk about them. Everything else came naturally (which shouldn't hinder our pedagogical theorist from writing volumes about it). Instead of preparing for class, you (both students and teacher) postpare, either for the next week and/or just put it on the internet (I kept a Yahoo group for every class). Lesson plan (reusable): Ask them what's on their minds, one after the other, listen, and ask a lot of questions. This will make somebody famous someday, because it works.
I like to think of it as gardening. Elliott Coleman was the best gardener I ever had. He was still running the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins (which he founded in 1947) when I was a freshman, and he let me into the poetry seminar even though at the time it was meant only for grad students. Once a week about 15 of us would crowd into his office in the basement of Gilman Hall ("The best thing about this place is the dust," he ruefully remarked when they started renovating it) and read our work. Mr. Coleman (he didn't have a Ph.D.) read most of it beforehand, penciling in little pluses and (fewer) minuses beside the lines that struck him one way or the other.
That was it. I suppose it was also my own tender age (18) as well as the relatively tender age of the world (1963), but still, I was taking other classes at the time and have taken (and given) many since, so it's not as if I have nothing to compare it to. It was special -- a place where you felt that anything could grow, and there were no weeds.
Coleman was pale, slightly built, and with his white hair and dark suits resembled nothing more than the Mondrian print on his office wall, one of those with lots of white space and intersecting black lines, much like those pluses and minuses he put on our papers. It's a little disconcerting to have such fond memories of someone who was so -- I'm looking for the word -- evanescent . It's sort of like the way I remember my grandfather. He was a somber man, long on cigars and short on words, but once he said to me, as we edged by each other in the narrow hallway late at night, "Two ships that pass in the night." I don't remember anything else he ever said. He did leave a short memoir, but for me he will always be that ship in the night.
I don't remember anything Elliott Coleman ever said either, except that remark about the dust. Maybe that's the word I'm looking for.
