Toast to the Tutors

Toast to the Tutors, Summer 2016
Graduate Institute (Annapolis)
Delivered 3 August 2016
       
It is perhaps common, and indeed even laudatory, for these toasts to ask some variation of an entirely worthwhile question, what do the tutors do for us? or what purpose they serve with their questions. But I want to approach this toast from a slightly different angle, not so much what the tutors give us or do for us; but what they show us about the very act of tutoring; that is, the act implicit in the title of tutor. This is, I freely confess, a selfish question from someone who is by profession a teacher, even one called upon to run “seminars” and have my students dialogue with the great thinkers and writers our civilization (the catch--when they can barely dialogue with themselves!). In these circumstances I am quite fortunate as a teacher, even if I look with envy at the rarefied air of St. John’s method and practice, so wholly focused and intent on learning from the great books that even the happiest teacher should be jealous.

In as much as I have come to St. John’s the last four summers as a student, I have also come as a teacher to this “teacher summer camp.” And here I would suggest that for those interested in developing and practicing their craft of teaching, there are no better models than our dear tutors we are fortunate to have here at St. John’s. The poor student cannot be a good teacher--and if the poor student has the appearance of being a good teacher, we might correctly judge them to be false teachers, who at best might find their way at times but cannot truly instruct. One of the etymologies given for tutor--and here the secondary teacher shows his true colors, for words mean things and who can argue with the Oxford English Dictionary when cited in the classroom--we see the Latin root suggests the idea of guardianship, and so the tutors are the guardians and defenders of the great books and the ideas contained within! But that is not quite right in our usage, for we operate here with the assumption that all can consider and learn from the text, and surely such great books do not need custodians to illuminate their meaning.

Looking further we see the early English usage, a fellow of Oxford or Cambridge assigned to the supervision of undergraduates, or even “a senior boy appointed to help a junior boy in his studies.” This strikes me as far closer to what we are aiming for at St. John’s when we describe the faculty of the college as tutors, students helping students wrestle with the great texts that they themselves wrestle with. To be sure, they are highly qualified and credentialed students, experienced and well-read far beyond ordinary students. But they are students none the less, wrestling with the same texts and the same questions that we as students wrestle with in our first reading. And in that struggle, we may learn from them just as much as we learn from the text. This is not to discount the program that gives life to the college, but to suggest that the diverse approaches to dialogue practiced by the tutors is their most explicit act of teaching. We learn from them how to approach texts, how to dialogue about texts, and how to reflect on texts. In this tutors serve as the models of the community of learning that St. John’s desires and practices; tutors do not teach what is to be learned but teach how we ourselves ought to learn.

Opening questions perhaps are the most obvious example of how tutors teach us how to how to approach a text, and who here does not remember fondly many opening questions that have haunted or amused them. But the opening question only to set the stage for dialogue, not determine it; the follow up questions and references to the text are what make the drama and learning of dialogue so valuable. Here the perspectives of the tutors is most useful, and their knowledge of how to read most beneficial. They call us back to the text when we have gone awry, and introduce connections that might be missed in first or second readings. Everyone in seminar, of course, has read the text and considered it in some capacity; tutors help us see how we might do so in deeper and more fruitful ways.

Tutors also show us how to dialogue about text. In his “Notes on Dialogue” Stringfellow Barr remarks that “‘participational democracy’ consists in everybody's listening intently; it does not consist in what commercial television calls equal time.” This is quite contrary to the common norms of so-called democratic education, where everyone’s voice is equal. If understanding a text is the purpose of dialogue, however, listening becomes far more important. And in this our tutors are masters, listening closely both to the text and the discussion, and responding and questioning not for their own sake but for the sake of understanding. Barr compares good dialogue to a basketball team, where the ball is advanced and passed not for personal glory but for the goal of a basket. In our seminars there is no opposing team, only the goal of understanding, and here tutors lead by their consistent example.

Both reading and listening are forms of reflection on the text, in that they require the humility to hear what is being said and carefully consider it against the argument itself and not oneself. To reflect is to wonder, to ponder what makes something so, to always consider it anew. I fondly remember a certain tutor--who is perhaps speaking at commencement on Friday--expressing delight at a fairly unoriginal and mundane observation in Virgil. “I’d never thought of it that way!” he said with manifest joy. “Liar,” I thought to myself, “you’ve read it a hundred times.” How foolish I was to think this, to assume that a text could ever be so familiar as to be beyond reflection. To be a tutor is to approach the text with new eyes on a daily basis, to ask what else it might have to teach us today. We all have sincerely wondered this when faced with Kant or Vico or Plato for the first time; but to maintain this spirit of inquiry as a mode of living is the mark of a true student. As students we know this; and those of us who are teachers must take it to heart lest become stale and false in our instruction.
Please raise your glasses and join me, classmates, in a toast to these students and models of inquiry, our dear tutors and true students of learning:

To the tutors, who teach us to read the text and just the text;

To the tutors, who ask us why? and thereby bring us into the community of dialogue that we might
learn alongside them;

To the tutors, who might read a book twenty times, have had many seminars and papers on said book; or even have written their own book about it; and in rereading  a particular passage, may come know it for the first time;

To the tutors, the best students of the best books, who choose to spend their summers dialoguing with us for the sake of learning, the best teachers;

Cheers!