The Surprising Value of a Wandering Mind

In college, I took a three-semester class sequence on European intellectual history taught by a long-tenured professor, Mary Gluck, who lectured straight through each session, usually reserving the last five minutes for questions. To some, this model was a nightmare; I loved it. Her lectures on topics including Haussmann’s urban design and Hegel’s theory of history were so finely honed, so expertly delivered, that I felt as though she had hinged my head open and deposited knowledge inside. Though the courses were challenging, learning from Dr. Gluck felt, in a certain sense, effortless. She delivered her scholarship to me, and I, lucky student, got to take it home.

However, the polymorphic nonfiction writer and English professor Mary Cappello suggests, in her excellent new book-length essay,, that I was misinterpreting my intellectual role. Midway through the text, which at once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form, Cappello writes, “Fastened to our seats in the lecture hall, we aren’t funnel-heads into which a lecturer’s knowledge is poured.” On first reading that assertion, I bristled: But I now see how tenuous the conditions were that helped me learn so easily in that style. I was a full-time student living on campus; I was an insecure perfectionist afraid to speak in class, but obsessed with the mandate to learn. I arrived to lectures in a purely receptive state: present, undistracted, and eager to be taught.