HOW TO READ YOUR PROFESSORS

It is more than likely, during your college career, that you will be assigned to read something for a class written by the instructor for that class: an essay, a chapter, an article, a translated text, perhaps even an entire book or books. This situation is not unusual or surprising, and usually is a (positive) sign that your professor is teaching in an area to which she has already dedicated a great amount of thought and attention. You want your professors to teach according to their interests! They will be more engaged, more thoughtful, and more open to your fresh ideas.

You may wonder if special rules apply when discussing your professor's work in a class taught by that professor. Should you pull your punches? Treat the text with more reverence? Merely ask process-oriented questions ("How did you come up with this argument?" "Were those texts difficult to interpret?") instead of more incisive questions?

In short: no. You should treat your professor's work just like every other primary and secondary source, scholarly or theoretical, that you encounter in a class: with a critical distance, with openness to her argument but an appropriate sense of skepticism that allows you to question what she is saying, how she says it, and for what reasons. You should engage with your professor's scholarly work just like you engage with the work of scholars who are not in the room. (So you may want to refresh yourself on how to read a scholarly essay and book.)

In a sense, you have already been engaging with your professor's work all semester: the syllabus, course outline, assigned readings, and even the flow of class discussions are the product of your professor's ideas about how to think about the course subject. (This is true even in classes in which students lead discussion and even choose readings and topics.) You have already been "inside your professor's head" by virtue of the very ideas and themes of the class, and to the extent that you have been discussing these themes and ideas (and whether they are relevant, interesting, thoughtful, and so forth) you have already been critically engaged with your professor's ideas.

Of course, reading your professor's work directly may raise some awkward questions for you.

"How should I refer to the author?" Normally in class, you refer to the author in the third person (either "the author" or "Doe" or even "Jane Doe"). But with the author sitting in front of you, do you start a sentence, "You say on p. 5..."? Or should you still use an artificial third person? ("Jacobs says..."; "Professor Jacobs says..."?). It is probably best to use the second person when asking a question or making a point to professor ("You say on p. 5...") while using a respectful third-person when making a point to a fellow student, or the room in general ("Professor Jacobs says on p. 5...")

"Can I disagree with the professor?" Of course! In the same way that you are free to disagree with the professor in routine class discussion, you can also disagree with a point she makes in her published writing, even if she's sitting right in front of you. The same rules apply in any situation in which you are raising a counter point: remain respectful, be specific, and ground your opinion clearly in the class assignment and topics. (These are generally good rules for in-class discussion where disagreement arises.)

"Can I ask the professor questions about the reading?" Here we get into a little bit of "reader response" criticism: basically, once an author sends a piece of scholarship out into the world it is out of her hands. Whatever intentions she may have had for the piece go out the window, and it's up to the readers to make sense of the scholarly work. Often, unintended themes and ideas will emerge in the reader's interpretation, and the author has no recourse to correct that ("That's not what I meant!"). So a professor, when she assigns her own work, will have to walk a careful line to make sure the class understands the assigned reading (just as she does in any class) but not to try to control the way the reading is being interpreted. Generally, asking clarification questions will be all right; but asking the professor to rehearse her argument again will not be too scintillating.

In reality, having the author if a reading in the room shouldn't really change too much of the class dynamic: we should always approach any class reading with courtesy, openness, and critical thinking. It's useful to imagine that the author is always in the room, in an unseen corner, not to constrain our discussion but to remind us that real people have produced the works that we read and dissect.

This page has been written for Core II, section 9, taught at Scripps College in Spring 2010, by Andrew Jacobs. Feel free to link to this page, but please to not reproduce it without permission.