What I want is to show students that they have the strength to cope with all the truth they perceiveßthat, if their thinking is not neat or does not square with what they want to think (or think they should think), they have the strength to admit it. I want them to see that the truth is enough. I want them, for instance, to be capable of living with the fact that they cannot quite get a grasp on the clean, clear truth they feel is just beyond their reach in King Lear , and also with the fact that King Lear does evoke the conviction that graspable, portable truth is being revealed, and that, with just a little more mental effort on our part, that truth will be in our grasp. I want to show students that they are strong enough to deal with complexity and paradox without denying its existence by attempting to argue away inconvenient truths.

I try to go to class prepared to handle whatever text we are reading in any of a great number of ways. I try to be ready to make the particular coherent whole I plan on making evolve from whatever questions or observations the students present in the first couple of minutes of class. And, if, as one usually can when one talks about masterpieces of literature, I can get a class to show itself that two or more things it finds to be true about a work are logically inconsistent with one another and yet undeniable, I am in a position where I can make them see howßand how wonderful it is thatßHamlet , or Gulliver's Travels , or Paradise Lost , or "Kubla Khan," or Pride and Prejudice enable their audiences to cope with inconvenient truths.

Let me try another tack: I will make a list of things I try to do and avoid doing as a teacher:

I insist upon taking students seriouslyß seriously enough to argue with them, seriously enough to snap their heads off if they cannot show me logical bases for their assertions, and seriously enough to retreat in open confusion when they disagree with me and show me I have in fact misunderstood the materials I have presented.

I refuse ever to say the equivalent of "Pretty good for a kid"ßto say "That's an interesting point" to a student so that I can get on with the class without being bothered by whatever it was the student said that was either nonsense, or irrelevant, or merely seemed so to me.

Similarly, I probe and question every phrase of every sentence of every essay submitted to me. I treat freshman essays as if they were submissions to scholarly journals. And I am not tactful in my comments. If you take a student as seriously as we faculty take each other when we argue on panels at conferences, then the student usually grows to meet that level of debate. The best thing that happened to me as an undergraduate happened on the sidewalk outside a classroom building at Harvard in my freshman year. The instructor in the class I was taking was disgusted by the illogic of what I had been saying. He shook his fists in frustration and said, "You're making the same damn-fool mistake Dostoyevski made." I didn't feel vindicated, but I didn't feel patronized either.

There is one final thing worth saying. At any given moment I may feel that I am not doing a good job in my courses, and feel my preparations are inadequate, or that I am giving students short shrift. I realize I have thought this about my teaching during every term of every year since I started to teach. I've always thought of myself as an excellent teacher who, at the given moment, is possibly failing to do his job with full responsibility.

Revised: 1993