Beth Salerno

The value of teaching and the liberal arts

January 25, 2009 Author: Beth Salerno

Last semester I taught three classes.  (Usually I teach 7 a year, with three one semester and four the other).   There were my ten senior researchers working on their 25 page papers.  Fifteen students explored the world of public history in museums, archives, cemeteries and on the web.  And twenty first year students studied Ancient Greece, Israel and Rome in a team-taught college-wide Humanities course.

I had forgotten how broad a reach those courses would be.  Students choose their own research seminar topics, so I read about the War of 1812, the Oneida religious community, Irish politics, the Civil War, school desegregation in Louisiana, and federal theatre in the New Deal, among other topics.  Add in public history readings about building stone walls or the politics of commemoration and then Humanities reading from the Iliad, the Bible and Plato’s Republic and you realize my semester ranged across three continents and 3000 years.

My time in Korea was a great reminder of the value of a liberal arts education.  I had to know a little about a dozen scholarly areas, and be able to locate information and create opinions on everything else.  I had forgotten how true that was in my U.S. teaching as well.  Both my Korean and U.S. students also had to be convinced that the work I required them to do really was likely to help them in some way later on.  It was far more obvious to the Korean students that they would use English than that my U.S. students would use the Iliad.  But the joy and value of the liberal arts is that you never know exactly what you will use - the future is not yet shaped.  Having a broad base of shared knowledge gives you more to draw from as you try to apply the past in creative ways to solve future problems.

I miss my Korean students.  Ji Jae-yong, Lee Jin-mi, Yon Doo-hui, I Gyu-chan, Na Kyung-min, Son Min-kyung and dozens of others.  Some still write, sending pictures of themselves and of department events.  I try to keep in touch with as many as I can. 

My experiences in Korea reminded me how much teaching is really about mentoring, about helping a student to fulfill both their academic and personal potential. At its base, teaching is about building relationships, getting students to trust that you have their best interests at heart.  The relationships with the students, in the present and the future, make teaching worth doing - for the people on both sides of the desk. 

Entry Filed under: reentry, Teaching