Teaching as an Act of Service

Even though I have taught my courses several times, I find that I am always excited to begin each new semester and to better understand the mysterious interplay between teacher and student. It’s critical to understand this teaching as an act of service. Understanding this in the abstract is one thing, but truly appreciating this idea and allowing it to guide one’s teaching is another. The following are my personal reflections on how coming to terms with this continues to motivate me to improve my craft.

When I say that teaching is an act of service, I mean teaching is for the benefit of the student and not the teacher. Each student has their own individual intellectual needs, and teachers ought to be equipped to meet those needs. Absent those needs, teaching becomes superfluous. Teachers are servants to the goal of producing lifelong learners.  However, I emphatically do not mean that the teacher must always respond deferentially to students’ demands.

Let me describe how my early teaching career fell short of service. Drake University, where I teach, is a small university combining liberal arts education with an emphasis on business and professional education. Many students come to Drake to study law, pharmacy, or business; some come looking for a liberal arts education. When I first started teaching regularly in the fall of 2015, I labored under two delusions. (There were surely more, but I will stick with two to not unduly embarrass myself). The first delusion was that students would be dazzled by the philosophers we read. They would thrill to the Republic of Plato and to excerpts from Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. While some students surely take delight in such things without external motivation, these students are rare. Most students, while they may like me and find my classes entertaining, will not take up reading the Republic again as a source of pleasure.

The second delusion was that the students would be delighted by my brilliance. They would marvel at the knowledge I shared and be captivated by my lectures, my humor, my charisma. If you’re laughing, you should be! Both delusions are harmful to the teacher-student relationship because they detract from the true purpose of teaching: to help students become lifelong learners. These two delusions served me, not my students.

As a service, teaching often involves unglamorous tasks. Philosophy teachers must think long and hard about how to motivate students to become better at writing, more competent in speaking, and more adept at reasoning carefully about difficult ideas. It’s easy to get caught complaining about the lack of sophistication our students may bring. Like the grumpy old man who dislikes children, forgetting that he too was once a child, we can easily forget that we were once students with a similar lack of sophistication. If we take our work seriously as teachers, we must face up to aspects of teaching that may feel unglamorous. Unglamorous does not mean unimportant; unglamorous work is often the most necessary. No one seriously discusses the glamor of cleaning toilets or garbage collecting. But who would deny that such jobs are necessary? However, what may feel like a boring task can turn into one of joy when you and your students can together recognize their progress.

One unglamorous task I had to come to terms with in a first-year seminar this past fall was looking up the meanings of words and allusions with which students were unfamiliar. This first-year seminar was entitled “What Is College For?: Love, Friendship, God, and You.” We read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. One difficulty, however, was that students frequently did not bother looking up unfamiliar words in the reading. Such tasks feel boring. If they don’t understand a word like “satiety,” a word Augustine uses in a prayer in Book Ten of his Confessions, then they won’t appreciate completely the passion with which Augustine is addressing God. If they fail to grasp the teaching known as Manichaeism, they will not understand what motivates Augustine intellectually and emotionally in his quest for the truth.

Willing to play to the less than admirable motive of learning for a grade, I offered extra credit to students willing to look up difficult words and explain their meanings to class.  This serves my students by helping them recognize an intellectual need they have and develop the skills to meet it. Dictionary definitions do not settle philosophical arguments, but most first-year students whom I teach do not have a broad stock of learning upon which to draw when reading difficult texts like those mentioned above. Gamifying the activity of looking up difficult words and concepts helped them stay engaged, and they began to enjoy competing to see who could look up the words the fastest. More often than not, the exercise provided opportunities for joint laughter.

Secondly, as a service, teaching involves contributing to something that is essentially incomplete. Our students take our courses because they lack knowledge and skills, and our job is to help them recognize this incompleteness and provide the tools to address it. This incompleteness implies that teachers have an obligation to teach all our students wherever they are in their learning process and not just those we consider further along in the acquisition of knowledge and skills.

This second point is one to which I am personally sensitive. Having been blind all my life, I know firsthand how it feels to be excluded in a classroom where a teacher writes a formulation on the board without stopping to explain. If I hadn’t raised my hand to stop the teacher and ask her to explain what she had written, I would have been lost. Good teachers recognize the need to serve all students. This point is often made with respect to students who have fared less well acquiring the skills and abilities during high school that aids success in college, but the point must also be made for students without such impediments. Bright, well-read students also need to be shown that the college experience is worth their time and effort, and that the life of the mind is its own reward. If teachers are not careful while aiming to make education available for all, such students can experience our courses as drudgery. Conscientious teachers must work to teach all their students, doing their best to make their subjects interesting and stimulating to both beginning and more advanced students.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. He might have overshot a bit, but for philosophers, this is certainly true. In light of Socrates’ dictum, I pose the following for self-examination, not for the purpose of wallowing in guilt and shame but for the goal of becoming better at our craft. What unglamorous tasks do we sometimes avoid because it is convenient, though less helpful to our students? When we inculcate good educational habits such as using dictionaries, revising drafts, and having students read aloud, how can we motivate students to engage in these tasks wholeheartedly? What strategies are we developing to aid our students in becoming whole human beings? Students long for wholeness, and if we as professors do not at least address this longing, we can rest assured that their longing for wholeness will not be replaced; their longing for wholeness will be met somewhere else. Finally, what are we doing to communicate to students our own passion for our subject? How are we keeping our teaching fresh? Again, these questions are meant to spur us on to teach, not for our own sake, but for the sake of the students we are responsible for educating.

Cody Dolinsek

Cody Dolinsek received his PhD in Philosophy in 2020. He was previously a visiting assistant professor at Drake university, at is currently an adjunct instructor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. His philosophical interests are wide ranging and include political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of love, and the history of philosophy. He is also keen to explore philosophy’s relationship to the disciplines of history and literature. While unsure of the ability or wisdom of philosophers to pursue grand systems that explain how everything hangs together, he is nonetheless grateful for the attempts at such system-building, regarding them as indicative of what is best and worst in the human spirit. For him, teaching philosophy is one way in which to foster friendship around the big questions about the meaning of human existence and how to make the most of it.