I once worked with a man who, after a long career as a college administrator, found himself in the happy circumstances of sitting on a pile of tens of millions of dollars, awarding a few of these millions every year to people doing research into teaching and learning, on behalf of a well-known foundation. He was a research psychologist, more precisely an authority on the behaviorist school of psychology.

He told me about a thrilling breakthrough in his work: he’d found an agricultural economist at a state college in the south who had developed a precise statistical model for establishing how much difference individual teachers were making in their students’ learning. Looking at test scores both before and after new class terms, clustering statistically similar students into comparative groups, and backing out the influence of outside learning, this agronomist was able to look across his state, and point to the teachers that really were better than the rest in helping students learn. He could point to the top ten or twenty percent – the stars. And he could point to the dividing line between the better-than-average and the worse-than-average teachers. I got excited hearing about this, too. I assumed that with this tool, a school district could look at each year’s crop of new teachers, identify the better than average, and secure them to long-term contracts, while offering thanks and a fond farewell to the others. But that wasn’t the idea.

“We believe,” my senior colleague told me, “and in fact we’re certain of it, that a great teacher is what a great teacher does. We’re certain that we can show the not-so-great teachers what it is that their better-performing peers actually do, and we can help these other teachers do it too. So that everyone improves significantly, and you don’t simply identify the existing high performers. You make more of them.”
I wasn’t convinced.
Talking with many of my favorite teachers – men and women who taught me in school, who taught my children, who have made me say “wow” when I think about what they do for their students – I’ve come to doubt him. I’ve seen too many teachers do what I think of as the wrong thing, ranging from being mean to students to teaching in ways that I can’t stand, get fantastic results.
The relationship between teacher and student can be so complex, and the real exchange of ideas and feelings that leads to genuine learning so intricate and subtle, that I have no doubt that there is, in addition to a set of skills and techniques, an additional and quite large factor in being a great teacher that can’t be taught. The teacher’s personal character and ability to connect emotionally with students are certainly big parts of this mysterious quality, but there’s more to it. Reading the room and being able to switch modes of instruction at the right time is a part of it too, as is the pure joy that a great teacher takes in learning. But there’s a quality of being a great teacher that I think can’t be reduced further – that can be recognized, increased, and supported, but not imparted if it’s simply absent to being with.
As an observer and leader of teachers, I have to be humble. I have to say, at times, this teacher is making great things happen. The kids are happy and learning what they need to learn. And I couldn’t tell you how it’s being done, because I sure wouldn’t do it that way – but I love this teacher. I love the success. I love seeing the kids learn. And so my eyes are always open, and I try not to let the limits of my own theories of what makes a great teacher get in the way my ability to see greatness when it’s right there in front of me.

I felt like an outsider when I was teaching at Harvard for any number of reasons. I was not a part of the religion the school was founded to promote and protect. I was not a believer in the kind of high-level research the school made its first priority. I did not like the feeling of institutional self-satisfaction. I’d never have been admitted as a student at Harvard, and I suppose that made a difference in my attitude, too.
I was happy to be there, grateful even. But at the same time, not so happy. In some ways, I was predisposed to be an outsider, and I became the same kind of outsider that my parents had been in many of the institutions of their lives. Not the usual suspect. Not the expected type.
Both of my parents were raised in New York City, both had been teachers for at least a little bit of their professional careers, and no one who knew them would say that either one ever was at a loss for words. They were both talkers, both confident in what they had to say and quick to tell others what was really going on. Not shy people. Not prone to lapses of silence.
But two moments of silence, one from each of my parents, stick in my mind. Years ago, I was a full-time graduate student in New York City, living with my wife and our two small daughters, taking my comprehensive exams for my PhD and teaching like a madman to keep the family in food and diapers. At my graduate school, most professors taught two classes a term as a full teaching load. At other schools, three was the norm. I was routinely teaching five, six or seven courses a term, often at three or four different colleges around town, paid per course and not much. The more I taught, the closer my little family came to paying all of our bills. I taught a range of courses – American literature, speech, ethics, and a lot of college composition classes.
Composition was the least interesting course for most full-time professors to teach, and in some ways the hardest. Lots of papers to grade, and to do it well the teacher would have to learn how each student thought, and what ideas and what styles of language were struggling through often muddled prose to meet the world.
I liked teaching composition, and there were no shortage of classes to be picked up here and there around the city. Part-timers like me liberated more senior scholars to teach the courses with more prestige and less insistent demands on the teacher. As I entered my fourth year of graduate school, I began to think that surely no other young teacher in New York City had taught more college writing courses than I had in the few years prior, and I had certainly learned a few things about how to help young adults (and not-so-young adults) read, think and write better. I was still a year or two away from being ready to go on the job market to seek a full-time tenure-track job in my sub-specialty of American social rhetoric, but I always had my eye out for something special that might allow me to grasp onto some decent university’s payroll sooner, if only for the sake of my daughters’ habits of requiring food and clothing on a regular basis.
I saw an ad that year for a full-time position teaching writing at Harvard University. I applied, interviewed, and expected absolutely nothing. I was at least a year early in the process – my own professors had not declared me ready, and I had only barely begun on my dissertation. But all those college composition classes I had taught had given me a few things to say about teaching writing, and the intensity of my apprenticeship had some appeal to the good people in Cambridge who looked me over.
Bot of my parents – each long departed from their marriage, but still joined in the project of launching their three young adult children into the world – had the same reaction to my phone call when I told them that I’d gotten the job. Both of these talkative New York City never-at-a-loss-for-words Woody Allen talk-talk-talking, bagel-and knish-eating stereotypes, hung there on the phone without a word for the count of twenty. Speechless. Shocked. And happy. But mostly shocked. They hadn’t doubted me because they’d thought I wasn’t good enough, I’m sure, but because they knew how odd a fit I would be at Harvard.
On arriving to start my new job, even with as lowly a faculty station as mine, I was given a special credit card good only for use at the Harvard Faculty Club. The club did not sully itself with actual cash transactions. Only faculty and their guests could dine there, and only the special cards were accepted for eventual payment. The club was lovely, and just across a brick path from the building housing my small, shared office. The food was fine, the tone a casual, almost shabby old-style men’s-club, leathery tone that other places I’ve been since have tried but failed to pull off. At the faculty club there was no false note. It was what it seemed.
My grandfather – a Depression-era high school dropout who loved learning more deeply and honestly than anyone else I’ve ever known, an autodidact who talked often about his long walks to the library, pronouncing it “lie-berry” – came to visit me once while I was still teaching there, and we sat for a time in one of the sitting rooms at the club. He soaked it all in, radiating the calm I remembered from his one day off a week when I was small boy visiting his apartment.
He would, those days, after an hour or two of sitting in his one reclining chair, smoking his pipe, reading the Sunday New York Times with classical music on his phonograph, exhale finally a long work-week breath, and sip back in the sweet air of Sunday. Then at length he would whistle gently a bar of Mozart or Brahms, at peace and exactly where he wanted to be.
After a bit of time deep in a chair at the faculty club, he glanced over to me and said, “You know, Pete, this place reminds me of something I’ve seen.” I thought, ah, how lovely, his life has had more of this than perhaps I’d thought; he’s been to places like this. He had indeed traveled a bit, had served in Asia, had been in the homes of many influential people either to deliver their dry cleaning from his brother’s store in a tony corner of New York, or in those half-hidden meetings from his political days when even a club like this (or especially a club like this) might host a circle of working men and intellectuals to plot some blow for the betterment of the world.
“I’ve seen this,” he said as I listened so hopefully, “in a movie.” Ah, I thought again, a movie – not a moment from the script of his own life. “It was called My Fair Lady, and there were clubs and rooms like this. Very inspiring.” A movie, alas, stretching all its elements to their breaking points, a film of the musical version of the George Bernard Shaw play about a too-cultured man reinventing a waifish woman taught to sound and act like an aristocrat, every convention, from the social caste of both key players to the club rooms and the comforts of their inhabitants, mocked.
My grandfather had the image, the scene, but not the mockery in his head. Too far from his own world and too precious in its premise, I think, for him to feel that mockery. A better innocence there, I still feel, than the man or woman who gets the joke could feel. He was an outsider too as we sat there, inside the club.

In a room not quite as refined as some of those at the faculty club but even grander in its own way, I’d had a similar experience a few years earlier. It was a large room with easily a twenty-foot ceiling, a grand piano, and old couches and sunken chairs scattered about on top of an immense Oriental rug. It was the graduate-student lounge at Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall, taking up about half of the first floor of that building. I’d go there to sit and read, to grade student essays, and to think while drinking in the atmosphere.
My undergraduate college, a large, competitive public university, had nothing like this. Its public spaces felt busier and more practical. The architecture was mid-century airport, the place not built for conversation or reflection.
Something better was happening at Columbia. But in that room in Philosophy Hall, I’d overhear conversations, look over people’s shoulders at what they were reading – and writing – and I’d feel silently put in my place. This was an educated crowd, a brilliant crowd self-selected to be the hardened core of students left still studying, still doing all their assigned reading and more, still looking forward for class to begin even after twenty years of schooling. And then someone – likely a PhD candidate in French or philosophy – would walk over to the grand piano in the room and start playing a Bach fugue. I’d be enthralled, intimidated, and feel smaller and larger at the same time.
I looked to my professors for guidance of a sort – not for direct advice but to see how exactly they lived in this environment. Many were simply swimming in their home waters. They were graduates of similar schools, had gone from college on to graduate school without much of a break, and then through some combination of luck, merit and pure single-mindedness had landed jobs that would pay them well for reading, writing, thinking and teaching, and demand modest levels of what most people would call work.
Others, though, were clearly outsiders. Some were angry; some were timid. I took for granted that all were extraordinary thinkers and mostly I was right. But some were at least a little bit like me. I thought I caught an occasional wink now and then from a professor. A literal pat on the back, a bit of praise including a hint that, yes, this is a different kind of environment, and yes, there’s a mood to the place that is in some ways absurd.
Once I was asked to give a presentation to fellow graduate students who were teaching writing to undergraduates. To the room full of about forty of my colleagues, I talked about some of the aspects of writing, like “attitude” and “angle” that were part of the curriculum we were all teaching, and I stuck out my arms to become an airplane and talk about what these terms mean for pilots – different things than they mean for writers, but not entirely different. The connections added nuance and vibrancy to how a young writer might think of attitude in what she writes, I said. And, I added, it’s a really good thing for a student to see his professor buzzing around like an airplane now and then. It punctures the stuffiness, and gets the crowd to pay a little more attention. A couple of people snickered. Some probably liked what I’d said, one or two might have even liked the way I’d said it, but I got a few high-handed questions after my part of the presentation was over, and the dazzling intellects in the room (truly, these were such brilliant people) seemed to dismiss my talk. My knees actually shook a little as I took a seat.
Later, the professor running the writing program – a Milton scholar with a world-wide reputation – stopped me in the hallway to put his hand on my shoulder and thank me, telling me I had done a good job. I don’t think he actually said “ignore the fools who didn’t like it,” but I heard that message anyway. He certainly belonged in any of those rooms, and could outperform most of those students in any task of thought or exposition. But he also had his eyes open for students who felt like outsiders, and now, with more than twenty years of distance, I imagine that most every student in my graduate program, the genius as well as the fools probably felt like outsiders themselves on occasion. This particular professor – Ted Tayler – understood that feeling, looked for it, and he found an occasion to break through it, to connect. I’m still grateful.