How to Be an Artist

When Glasgow-born Gilbert Highet started teaching Latin and Greek at Columbia University in 1937, he was struck with one persistent thought: "My students were always coming up to me after class and saying, 'Goodness, this is fascinating stuff. But why the devil wasn't it taught us before?' And I'd say, 'It probably was.' And then they'd admit, 'Well, I guess it was . . .' "

Some of the fault was the students', Highet decided, but a lot of it sounded like plain bad teaching. Last week, after chewing the subject over in his own mind for a long time, 44-year-old Classicist Highet published a lively, highly readable book on his own profession, The Art of Teaching (Knopf; $3.50).

Professor Highet picked his title carefully. "I believe," says he, "that teaching is an art, not a science . . . It is much more like painting a picture or making a piece of music . . . like planting a garden or writing a friendly letter." It is an art that must change with every class and every pupil, from the "spoiled, ill-mannered boobies . . . whose ideals are gangsters, footballers, and Hollywood divorcees," to the gifted enthusiasts who are "the joys, the sorrows, and the horseflies of the teacher's life."

Bubbles & Cheers. What sort of teacher do students remember? "They always recall the ill-tempered and eccentric [ones]--Miss Crab, who hit them with the pointer, and Mr. Fizz, who blew bubbles." The'y also remember such teachers as Harvard's George Lyman Kittredge, who lectured w'ith such ferocity that he. once tumbled-off his platform, or such men as History Professor Woodrow Wilson of Princeton who spoke with such clarity and conviction that his students would burst into cheers. "But next to those," says Gilbert Highet, "they remember the teachers who made them remember."

To make students remember, a teacher "must believe in the value and interest of his subject as a doctor believes in health." Nor can he get away with a shaky memory ("ridiculous and dangerous," says Highet, "like . . . a doctor who gives one gram of digitalis instead of one grain. . . or a merchant who cannot find the goods his customers want"). And if he lectures in the stumbling, halting manner of a Stanley Baldwin, he runs the risk of having the same effect: "Half an hour of [it] put everybody to sleep. Several years of it put Britain to sleep."

Largeness of Heart. The teacher must also know how to organize his course, reminding students of the whole, "pointing out the peaks still to be scaled, the valleys unexplored," as they examine each of the parts. "The last three or four days of teaching can make a good course or spoil it," warns Highet. "Usually they are given up to a mad rush through the last ten experiments, a sketchy outline of the century still to be covered, an earnest but hollow adjuration to 'look over this for yourselves, with special attention to,' or something else of that kind . . . A teacher who huddles the last quarter of his course into a rapid-fire survey and says goodby . . . does not quite understand his pupils . . . He cannot understand how fast the boldest outlines are fading from, their minds."

Beyond such rules, says Highet, the art of teaching "is difficult is describe . . . It is still more difficult to acquire. It cannot be taught at teachers' colleges, and not always developed by meditation and practice. Yet it is invaluable for a successful teacher; it is the core of a successful man or woman. Roughly speaking, it could be called largeness of heart."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.