No recognition has ever been more gratifying to me than my department's putting my name before the Committee on Teaching as a candidate for a Distinguished Teaching Award. Teaching is the heart of my life and identity, in class and out. (My daughters used to say, "Skip the lecture, Dad, and just answer the question!") Yet my teaching style is a relatively low-keyed, inconspicuous one§much cooler than those that usually pack auditoriums and spawn legends of the totally committed, self-sacrificing professor. And far from having developed daring new pedagogical techniques, I have always felt happy with the traditional classroom situation, only slightly modified to bring out the results that I will try to characterize below.

My approach to teaching is an empirical one. I take the subject matter—the books or ideas in question—to be primary. That is, I assume I am on hand not to argue positions or provide entertainment but to facilitate an encounter between texts and minds. My aim is to provide needed context, evoke responses, conduct a dialogue, draw out pertinent issues, and in general to foster a process of progressively sharpened understanding. In this spirit, my one quasi-innovation of technique has been to conduct lecture classes, even quite large ones, partly as if they were seminars. I do lecture, but I expect to be interrupted by questions and I punctuate the lecturing with questions of my own.

For me the main pleasure of teaching resides in coping with the unexpected. Consequently, I try to be well prepared in a way that will leave me both relaxed and alert§looking for fruitful trouble rather than trying to touch on all the expected points. If there is a philosophy behind this attitude, it is a belief that real teaching occurs not through imparting information but through arousing intellectual passions and presenting an example of thought in action.

For this reason, I have always been especially drawn toward courses in expository prose, where primary focus can be directed to problems of audience, authority, and persuasion. My several textbooks for freshman composition have extended this interest, and my one lasting contribution to the Berkeley curriculum is, not surprisingly, a composition course, English 144. Most students who enter that course expect to be working strictly on humdrum problems of usage and organization, but in my own conception they are taking a course in critical thinking, a virtue that seems to me essential to effective prose.

I feel that my writing—not just of textbooks—and my teaching are very much of a piece. This may sound disconcerting to someone who has noticed that polemics, satire, and occasional sarcasm characterize my prose about cultural and theoretical issues; I hasten to reiterate that my teaching, though tinged with the skepticism and irony that are mother's milk to me, rests on hospitality to varying points of view. I take some pride in being a patient and respectful listener. What really connects my teaching and writing is a belief in making widely available the tools for forming rational judgments.

I would surmise that some of my most useful efforts as a teacher have come not in the classroom but in commenting on students' written work. My dissertation advisees will probably testify that I am the most doggedly demanding reader they have had to cope with. By being such, I know I have driven away some promising students who needed more strokes than I was ready to give. But I think I have also helped to launch some successful academic careers and to propagate high standards in the presentation of evidence. I will settle for that tradeoff, though not without a twinge of remorse. Ideally, a teacher should somehow be as supportive as he is critical. My own version of supportiveness, which clearly doesn't work in all cases, is to be forever ready to read a new draft and to show how it can be further improved. It pleases me greatly to learn that curmudgeons, too, may be eligible for consideration as Distinguished Teachers.