parini and the eros of teaching

**before i get started on this particular post, please let me say that i clearly know the line between appropriate and inappropriate interaction, and i have not ever crossed and never will cross it.**



in the art of teaching, parini never stops stressing the importance of living one's passion for his or her subject matter, as that is the real exemplum of independent thinking for the student. toward the end of the book, this element becomes extremely important for office hours. i quote:

"Nobody who has taught for very long has not experienced the strange allure and intimacy of the teacher-student relationship; it goes beyond sex...There is true love in the passing on of knowledge, and this involves understanding: the teacher must really know the student, on some deep level, for teaching of the most intense kind to happen. The student must have real love for the teacher. We have all experienced this, from first grade through graduate school, and beyond" (124).

and this has happened to me. when i was studying at umd, i became somewhat transfixed by one of my professors. we worked closely together on one of my favorite authors, and during our conversations, i learned so much more than i ever would have if i'd had to do the majority of research on my own. as parini noted, this is a two-way street, and i think that this individual found great pleasure in our dialogue as well. and, as parini also noted, we were aware that "this eros is naturally dangerous as well as beneficial" (124). several times, as we noticed the growth of our small-talk before our sessions, we would consciously and sometimes awkwardly curtail the non-academic topics and force ourselves to move on to the analysis before us.

at this point in this remeniscence (sp?), i want to stress parini's point that the exchange transcends the sexual and/or the romantic, and i never would have dared to broach any suggestion of that sort. it would have destroyed so much beauty.

anyway, i'd never before experienced that sort of exhilierating intellectual intimacy. truthfully, i'm somewhat wary of living that again, mostly because it is extraordinarily intense and, i confess, sometimes too enticing. but at the same time, i'll remember everything that i learned about milton. i'll always respect the man who taught me and yet simultaneously treated me as a colleague.

and, perhaps most importantly, i'll always fiercely treasure those friday afternoons that, if only for an hour, carried me to a greater chance of being.