If you could kick the person responsible for most of your troubles, you wouldn't be able to sit down for six months.
- Gordon Gray
And they go on like this, filling in here and fitting in there, half because of pressure, half through inertia, until they wake up at the age of forty and look around to discover that they have no really solid interests, no large book in the making, and so only a vaguely defined reputation. They can still be happy, for it is a delightful career to teach one of the world's great literatures. Yet they will have a sense of lost opportunity, and they have earned it.
They did not choose their field. They did not, in fact, plan their career. They allowed themselves to drift this way and be pushed that way - while the years passed. Some of the finest scholars in history have made this mistake. They were great men, and superb students; but they gave the world much less than they could and should have given it. Scholars less distinguished have often ruined their talents by neglecting to use them in the best possible way. How often have you heard that X might have written a fine book, but that he had put it off until it was too late!
You know how careful the Germans plan things. When a young German scholar was beginning his career, he used to choose three or four large fields in which he felt a real interest, on which there was a good deal of work to be done, which - an important point - were all linked to one another, and which - most important of all - he felt to converge upon the very center of his subject. He would contrive as far as possible to make these the topics of his first classes and seminars. He would write groups of lectures on them, and nurse and nourish each group until it grew into a book. If he were energetic enough and percipient enough, he would this become the author of three or four books, each of which would recommend and illuminate the others. He would then continue studying and lecturing on the area around each of these fields, enlarging it strategically from year to year until he had built up a really authoritative knowledge of almost the whole subject. Such a process gives cumulative results. Scholars who planned their learning and their teaching in that way usually found, by the time they were fifty or so, that they had enough interests and nearly enough knowledge to fill three careers.
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Not one of these subjects could be exhausted in any normal working career. But a man might learn more and more about each of them; and, as he learnt, become a better, more richly equipped, and more stimulating teacher. We should expect him to find new themes to investigate as he advanced further into each field, and not only to write several interesting books of his own, but to suggest, to pupils differently inclined, many other topics on which they might add to the knowledge of mankind. The only danger would would be that he might always be so interested in moving on that he seldom stopped long enough to fix his ideas in a book. But if he planned his work at the beginning, he would probably have enough foresight and will-power to mark off its various stages by setting down the results he had achieved.
It is not enough, then, to choose your subject. A wise teacher will choose particular areas of his subject which he believes will be both interesting and illuminating, and will find that his increasing knowledge of them will give him a sense of mastery, will keep him from feeling he is merely plying a trade, and will somehow carry over to his pupils.
- Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching
