Recently I couldn’t help myself. I suppose that could apply to many recencies, if that’s even a word. Couldn’t we go to some special hotel to work on taking the long view, one with a sign outside that said “No Recencies”? Ah, digressing already. Where was am I?

A colleague whom I very much respect tweeted out her commitment to student-centered teaching as opposed to teaching-centered teaching. I replied with a tweet about one of what I’ll call my “new heresies” (although they’re really not new), that I myself favored the both-and. Teachers and students in the center. An interesting Twitter exchange followed, and I promised to explain myself a bit more, so here we are. No longer digressing.

Over the years I have become less and less swayed by this-not-that characterizations of responsible, responsive, effective teaching. For example, we are advised to be the “guide at the side” rather than the “sage on the stage.” (This isn’t exactly what my colleague meant, but I hope she’ll bear with me.) I understand the dichotomy, born of the experience of grand pompous windbags reading from yellowed notes oblivious to the presence of young, disengaged, and sometimes eye-rollingly contemptuous would-be learners in the audience. Or, as one of my own former teachers said in my presence, later in life, to my dismay but not my surprise, given my experience in his class: teaching undergrads is 75% talking about your research to a captive audience.

Undeniably expert, but a cartoon sage on a cartoon stage. Precisely, ugh.

And yet.

Why on earth would anyone pay thousands of dollars to be in the presence of anyone but a sage over fifteen weeks of demanding work on unfamiliar material? Notice that sagacity overlaps with, but is not completely synonymous with, expertise. In fact,  “sage” is one word with two separate meanings and two distinct origins, one of those happy accidents in language that makes a hermeneut like me playfully imagine, “coincidence? I think not.”

Oxford English Dictionary time: a sage is a person who is “wise, discreet, judicious.” Sage as an adjective, as in sage “advice or counsel,” is “characterized by profound wisdom; based on sound judgement.” It’s hard to imagine profound wisdom or sound judgment without specific knowledge, and lots of it. Expertise is necessary. But not sufficient. As I tell my students, if they think I am subjective in my grading, they are correct: it is my subjectivity that makes me valuable to them, as it is the seat of my judgment. There are no guarantees available about the soundness of my judgment–never any guarantees about that sort of thing. What we as human beings have instead of guarantees is a great cloud of witnesses, those from whom I learned what judgment involved, and for whom I demonstrated my own partial but developing powers of judgment. That is, I have somewhere on the order of 40 or 50 teachers who have judged my work over the years. I would say that around half of them qualified as sages, maybe more. Of those sages, all were different, all brought varied temperaments and approaches to the classroom, all brought varied temperaments and approaches to the task of sharing their sagacity with me in a way that would encourage whatever latent sagacity I might have to develop to its fullest extent.

This process continued, with growing intensity and deepening levels of specific expertise, as I went from elementary school, to junior high, to high school, to college, to graduate school. And the most intense contact I had with sagacity was the dissertation, the moment in which I had to wrestle most intensely with distributed sagacity (i.e., the critical conversation) in its bewildering, contradictory, repellent, and attractive forms, all the while apprenticing myself to one particular set of sages (my dissertation director, my second reader, my unofficial guide and mentor) and prepare myself to be in a formal encounter with at least two sages I had not worked with at all, during what we call the “defense.”

Again, no guarantees. The process does not automatically generate sagacity. Profound wisdom and sound judgment are not the sorts of “outcomes” (even to use that word in this context is to demonstrate its risibility) that can be confidently “designed” for (see above). But the long series of testimonials, endorsements, encouragements, shaped by genuinely profound wisdom and sound judgment and sometimes buffeted and bruised by the limits of my teachers’ sagacity and the strange, unpredictable emergence of my own developing powers of judgment, finally added up to enough of a vote of confidence to bring me into the profession.

That process, in turn, makes me the professor who offers courses of study within a curriculum, courses of study that students enroll in as they progress through a degree program.

Sadly, too many students cannot imagine what I’ve just described. Many of them have no idea that there is such a journey, or what it involves, or how it touches on the very journey they have undertaken. Many, too many, have little sense of their education as a journey. Rather, their education appears to them as a set of concurrent and sequential tasks, assigned by those who have the power of assigning tasks. There is no journey. There is only a conveyor belt. The end of the conveyor belt is the reward of–oh, greater lifetime earnings? social capital? the chance to build conveyor belts for those who follow? grim thoughts, I confess, but perhaps not unwarranted.

So yes, teaching is teacher-centered, and thus also student-centered. The sage demonstrates sagacity, and elicits its development in others. The sage performs sagacity, where “performance” means not falsity or arrogance but (so I delight to imagine) the primary meaning of the word, per the OED: “to carry out.” to “discharge” a “service” or “duty.” As an intransitive verb, again per the OED, “perform” means “to do, carry out, execute, or accomplish what one has to do or has undertaken; to carry out one’s function, to do one’s part….”

In these senses–and why not perform them?–the act of performing is an act of deep service to the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. That surrounds me. Mrs. Wills. Miss Spraker. Mrs. Lane. Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Dixon. Mr. Barnhart. Miss Byrd. Mrs. Arnold. That’s a partial list of the sages who saw me through as far as seventh grade. The list goes on, quite a ways. One of the gifts of age is also that I can see, however grudgingly (still) because of certain flaws and temperamental mismatches in both of us, that probably other teachers had sagacity that was real even if fitful or lost on me at the time. One of the other gifts of age is my own fitful but undeniably stronger powers of discovering sagacity in those who do not immediately display it.

So the stage becomes the place in which the teacher’s sagacity can be visible to all, and thus made present, and thus made meaningful, performed (sagacity is individual but valuable primarily in relationship). Anyone who’s ever attended a great performance of a great play will know that the stage, by some weird alchemy, makes a certain distance and a certain mode of display into an occasion of profound connection, one that could not occur without that nexus of heightened reality framed and made radiant by a proscenium, or thrust into the house, or perhaps surrounded by witnesses as it centers the very space of performance, and by centering that space, empowers what for the poet John Donne characterizes the power of love itself, the power to make “one little room an everywhere.”

I am most grateful, then, in my own journey, not for breakout rooms and report-outs (valuable as they can be), or for think-pair-shares (catalytic as they can be), or polls, or any of the myriad ways in which we rightly encourage what we sometimes confusedly call “interaction.” I am most grateful for those sages who performed where I could see them, and thus could mysteriously be with them, could fill myself with the savor of their sagacity and then, as Hopkins once wrote of the effect of great art, be inspired to “go and do otherwise”–not in reaction or rebellion, but in accepting my duty, now, to perform my own profession, infused by theirs, but distinctly, for better or worse, my own.

You’ll see what I did there with that word “savor.” “Sage” is also a spice. Unlike the “sage” above, which comes from the Latin sapere, to be wise, sage-as-spice comes from the Latin salvia, a “healing plant.” To this day, though the OED warns the usage is “Now rare,” a sage can still mean “A kind of herb or medicinal preparation of herbs.”

My sages keep saving my life. The medicinal wisdom they performed then, they perform for me still, evermore, beyond measure.

As every grateful acknowledger must acknowledge, the remaining faults are my own.