"Am I a Fraud?"

Most Ph.D.s who get instructors' jobs in U.S. colleges have had little or no training in teaching. Generally not required to take courses in education as grade and high-school teachers are, they are expected to learn pedagogical techniques as they go along. To help them over the bumps and bogs in the path of hard experience, Radcliffe Dean Bernice B. Cronkhite last week had turned out a Handbook for College Teachers (Harvard University Press; $3).

The Handbook contains snippets of homely advice from more than a dozen veteran Harvard professors including

French Scholar Andre Morize (Learn not "to talk with your hand in front of your mouth: it does not help!"), Historian David Owen ("Don't let yourselves become pedantic and pompous"), Biologist William H. Weston ("Never . . . feel an envious resentment toward [a student] if ... he shows promise of surpassing you"). Well up front, the Handbook offers a general caution or two about the whole profession. Writes famed Semanticist Ivor Armstrong Richards, after eleven years as a teacher at Harvard: "It's a daunting business being a professor . . . You will have, if you join this curious trade, to walk in public an endless slack wire over incredible abysses. It's a quivering wire, which seems to be constantly and maliciously shaken, but you will have to walk it right through to the day (which won't be very cheerful when it comes) when you are retired Emeritus. All your lives, you will be teetering on that wire. You will never be quite sure whether you are uttering words of inspired . . . aptness, or whether you are being completely inept. Often you will find yourself incompetent enough to be fired at once if anybody was intelligent enough to see you as you are. You will find yourself, during your lectures, in your private conferences, quite constantly starting sentences without the faintest idea of where they are going to end . . .

" 'Am I, or am I not, a fraud?' That is a question which is going to mean more and more to you year by year. At first, it seems agonizing; after that, it becomes familiar and habitual. Much later, it becomes . . . almost hopeful . . . You have to keep on tranquil good terms with this question, not forget it, not let it get into the unconscious . . . The more experience you have with people you're trying to teach, the more evident it will be that it's impossible to teach them . . . The best things that any elderly teacher can ever claim to have said as a teacher will be things, I think, that he had no intention of saying and no idea afterwards of what led him to say them."

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