by Daniel Troit

Created on: February 03, 2009   Last Updated: March 17, 2009

"Those who can, do. Those who cant, teach."

-The haunting, private mantra of my academia. As I continued through graduate school, it became clear that the applicability of my studies was an ever-diminishing value in the "real world" that my friends seemed intent on confronting me with. The question as to what I was studying would inevitably arise.

"Humanities", I'd say. I would then feel the tinge of the familiar anticipatory shame as I prepared for the inevitable follow up:

"Interesting. What are you going to do with that?"

"Teach, I guess." After studying Humanity's triumphs, the mere examination of them felt impotent and without justification. What was I to say? I'd not learned how to do much of anything, it seemed and my friends were on their way to healing the sick, creating technology and achieving in a very real way.

I felt fraudulent, as if I was getting away with something indulgent and wasteful. The absolute joy I took in my work had blinded me to the value of my task. As I listened to my friends fret and toil over their countless memorizations and theorems, I became certain that if what I was doing held such pleasure for me, it couldn't be a valuable work. The only career I could anticipate was the training of my replacement. What worth could such intellectual cloning bring? I approached my first collegiate teaching position as confirmation of my failure.

After my first class everything changed. I had overlooked something. I was not teaching Humanities students alone. Several differing career paths were learning the shape of their planet's soul from of all people, me. Far from a romanticized retelling of the past, I was providing the future with a contextualization of the world in which they would serve. Has an academic I realized, I was not serving as a mere capsule for trivia but rather an executer of the world's personality. Without our role in society, all that would be left to teach would be the factual materialism of information. Only with the unique insight of a professor would that information become knowledge. It was not my job to perpetuate information but profess knowledge.

My enthusiasm was quickly deflated by what I found to be a homogenized and inadequate grading system. How was I to quantify students' progress? Even with the most searching of essay questions, I still felt that I was only measuring an ability to conform and recall. How was I to be sure that my student's were really "getting it" and not simply telling me what they knew I wanted to hear? I at first attempted to sidestep the responsibility with a simple Pass/Fail policy. If students participated to my standards and made earnest attempts, they passed. If not, see you next semester. . .

This method proved even more arbitrary. Frustrated, I expressed my conflict to a senior professor. The purpose of grading, she informed me was not to make sure that my students understood so much as a motivation. Teaching was partitioned at all times into two categories, she said. The first was the delivery of information. The second was an education in responsibility and follow-through.

The knowledge that we profess in the academic community has little value without a proper method of application. Only a well-disciplined and self-motivated person is able to truly put to use the education received from higher learning. In this light, I was able to administer standards of grading that served as an impetus for the student's continued ability to apply knowledge. Understanding our role as not just perpetuators of ideas but also methods, it becomes easier to validate not just systems of grading but also our position as educators. Such validity, for me, is priceless.

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