The Teaching of Psychology in Autobiography: Perspectives from Exemplary Psychology Teachers Edited by Trisha A. Benson, Caroline Burke, Ana Amstadter, Ryan Sidey, Vincent Hevern, Barney Beins, & Bill Buskist.
51 A Life in Teaching Maryanne Wolf Tufts University pp. 348-353

I am a teacher. As long as I can remember, this has been true. To the glee of my siblings, my mother recently unearthed the notes from a childhood club that I organized for the edification of my neighborhood when I was seven years old. The motto of the club was "To educate education!" I do not know whether it was the syntactic play of the newly discovered morphemes that delighted me then, or some prescient sense of my pedagogical instincts, but I remember feeling, with all the unwavering determination of a seven year old, that I would become a teacher.

Over the last two and a half decades I became a teacher of many human beings, at various ages, in many places: young Filipino, Chinese, and Portuguese children in rural Hawaii; taciturn, struggling adolescents in inner cities; and, for the bulk of my life, undergraduate and graduate students in New England. Now I am a teacher of teachers and of researchers. As a Professor of Child Development in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, I teach undergraduate and masters students who become teachers, clinicians, pediatricians, lawyers, and all manner of professionals whose lives impact children. As the Director of a federally funded research center, the Center for Reading and Language Research, I teach undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students how to conduct research in cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, child development, and education; and how to become research teachers and professors of the next generation.

Along the way, I have received the highest approbation for my teaching and research from my university, from my professional organizations, and from the American Psychological Association at the state and national levels. Receiving the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award from the Massachusetts APA and the American Psychological Foundation's Teaching of Psychology Award were my greatest professional achievements in teaching.

With colleagues Robin Morris (Atlanta) and Maureen Lovett (Toronto), I received a series of large-scale R-01 grants and the Shannon Award for Innovative Research from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. This ongoing work attempts, among many other things, to apply our understanding of the reading brain to intervention for children with reading disorders. I received both a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Germany and the Norman Geschwind Lecture Award from the International Dyslexia Association for my research contributions to dyslexia based on work in the neurosciences.

Although the latter award was a notable research achievement, it was directly connected to the teaching of one of the most extraordinary scholars and teachers I have known in my lifetime, the late, eminent neurologist Norman Geschwind. Norman Geschwind changed the course of my professional life by introducing me to a new approach to the study of reading and reading disorders, based on the neurosciences, during the first year of my doctoral studies at the Harvard Reading Laboratory. To be named the recipient of an award in his honor was a poignant reminder to me of him, and of how inextribicably bound the connections are between teaching and research. The story of how I became a teacher is, in fact, interwoven with the influence of powerfully dedicated researchers and teachers, beginning with my first teachers in a red-brick, two-room school house in a tiny Midwestern town.

My Early Development as a Teacher

My earliest memories of teachers and teaching began in a school that looked like a nineteenth century woodcut! There were two rooms, eight grades, ninety students (± 10), and two nuns. By almost any criteria, the teachers of this little school were saints: Sr. Rose Margaret, Sr. Salesia, and later Sr. Ignatius, all Sisters of Notre Dame (an order that is beloved by neuroscientists because they volunteered to be subjects in a lifelong study of precursors to Alzheimer's disease). Let me describe for you one memory of the "day that never ended" for those teachers. There were four rows in each classroom, with each row representing a grade. At any given moment, some of the fourth row kids were "peer-tutoring" the second row; the third row were tutoring the first row; and our teacher was doing her utmost to teach the children who needed it most. By the end of the school day, each row had received attention to every basic subject at the particular grade level needed. Then after the children left, our teacher would remain tutoring the small number of children who could not learn to read.

To this moment I cannot fully grasp how these teachers did all they did and still achieve what they did. In my class of eight students, there are now two professors, one social worker, one engineer and seven college graduates. In retrospect, I know my teachers used an armamentarium of good teaching practices. Perhaps just as importantly, they were living models of two profoundly held beliefs --- that the potential of each young human being is precious, and that teaching them is a noble use of one's life. There is no question that the sisters of Sr. Mary's School left an indelible mark on my life that would become reinforced by my later teachers in high school (like Doris Camp) in college (Miss Noel, John Dunne) and finally in graduate school.

During my graduate studies at Harvard University, I began to understand the importance of every gifted teacher I had ever had or would have. From John Dunne and Norman Geschwind, I learned the role of story and bold personal insight in engaging the listener in everything from philosophy to aphasia. I shall never forget Geschwind's spellbinding tale of a temporal lobe patient whose epilepsy would become triggered by the simple twirling of a paper clip. From Jeanne Chall I learned the importance of setting high expectations for students, while never forgetting that the goal of these expectations was outside the self, to be found within our ability to change the lives of children. Helen Popp's kindness and attention to the details of each student's development gave us a unique supportive environment in which to risk, fail, and maybe to succeed. Carol Chomsky, Roger Brown, Jill de Vilhiers, and Eric Wanner began my life-long study of words in all their variousness and power. Courtney Cazden provided a daily model for how important the study of language is for the real lives of children whose potential could be snuffed out or propelled by their language environments. Each of these teachers changed, guided, modeled, and refined my concept of teaching and contributed to the ways I teach today. I am an amalgamation of each great teacher I have ever known.

What I never learned explicitly from them, however, was how one teaches. We taught by doing. We were called Teaching Fellows, the graduate student equivalent of on-the-job training. We were, therefore, autodidacts in the realm of teaching. For me this manner of teaching worked better than for most, in part because I had been so conscious of every teacher's style and its effect on my learning, and in part because I had been "teaching" since my primary grades. As I watch our young teaching assistants follow a similar apprentice and immersion model, I feel ambivalent. There is no formal training provided graduate TA's in many universities, much less for young professors, many of whom are perfunctorily assigned large introductory courses that can test the mettle of the most experienced professor. I believe we would all benefit as a profession if there was a brief, required seminar on teaching in which there would be a full range of participants from the youngest TA to the most experienced and gifted teachers. It would be, perhaps, the most sophisticated analogue of my peer-tutoring life in the tiny 19th century schoolhouse.

Working and Defining Myself as a Teacher

During my first years as a university teacher, I threw myself into the work of teaching without reserve. I won an undergraduate teaching award during my first interim position at Brandeis University, and I became recognized for my work with undergraduates at Tufts University, my first tenure-track position. There was a price. The more successful my teaching, the more students enrolled in my courses, the less time I had to pursue and publish my research.

I shall never forget in the fifth year of my teaching at Tufts that the then President of the University, the late Jean Mayer, appeared at the end of one of my large lectures. For fifteen minutes in raised voice and French accented syllables, my university president told me in no uncertain terms, that I had the highest approbation for my teaching and that it was not enough. He said that unless I stopped putting all of my efforts into teaching and started publishing prolifically, that I would never get tenure. I was totally shaken, which was exactly his well-intentioned goal.

Then and for the next years, I struggled to balance my drive to be the best of teachers and to produce quality research. To complicate this further, I wanted to marry and have a family of my own. It was a singularly difficult time. This balancing act for professors, particularly for women who want to have children, is still one of the toughest obstacles to dedicated university teaching. I continue to have this issue, but I developed my own set of strategies for addressing balance. During my pre-tenure years, I sought and received a fellowship that allowed me to have a teaching-free semester in which to write up my research. To be sure, I finished two articles during my honeymoon in Greece, a detail that my husband will never forget. I worked night and day during that time on my research program, and in the process, I developed life-long habits of writing. I also developed an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between one's research and teaching. Over time my research program became the basis for a huge thriving research center, the Center for Reading and Language Research, where the various projects become the basis both for teaching all aspects of research to students from undergraduate to post-doctoral levels and also for providing services to schools, neighborhoods, and now to several sites across the country. The research became the basis of my teaching and my service. It fueled my excitement for teaching over the years, whether in more sophisticated graduate seminars or in introductory child development courses, which I refused to give up, despite teaching.

The Examined Life of a Teacher

The balance between teaching and research was my first true obstacle to quality teaching: The balance among teaching, research, and family was the second. I shall never totally resolve these issues because they change with every year. What I have learned can be summarized in several reflections. First, my largest challenge every day is to confront what I must do that day and to use a Socrates "first principle" approach to the act of sequencing my priorities. In my life I have tried to place my children and family first in these priorities. Such a resolve is never simple and never perfect, especially given the multiple demands on a teacher and on a researcher. I fail daily at something, which leads me to the second statement.

The most syntactically, semantically, and philosophically inaccurate sentence about professional women that has ever been promulgated is "you can have it all". Syntactic constraints aside, young professional women can "try to do it all," but I think the next generation of female professors should not be placed in that position. If I could use my own struggles as a dedicated teacher as a case study, I would recommend an unflinchingly judicious re-evaluation of the expectations and goals of university professors as they evolve over the life span. I believe many truly gifted teachers, particularly young mothers or would-be-mothers, are forced to make choices that are terribly difficult, draining, and potentially wasteful. If our entire teaching/research system could be more developmentally conceptualized, I believe all aspects of the choices would be improved: for professors, students, and ultimately the knowledge base we contribute to as scholars and teachers.

As my own children enter high school and college, I find myself more attentive than ever to the needs of my students. They are all someone else's children who can benefit and perhaps be changed by my expectations, goals, and hopes for their potential and what this potential can bring our society. I now have the secret luxury of being able to give the students my best efforts at teaching, while giving my graduate assistants some of the teaching and research responsibilities I once assumed for myself. It is a beautiful moment in my teaching and research, for they are now more harmoniously balanced than ever before.

Such a moment (and indeed the writing of this chapter) allows me to examine where I've come as a teacher and to reflect upon where I want to go. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find that my thoughts turn more than ever before to the teaching of teachers, to the creation of new ways of teaching children with learning problems, and to the dissemination of the latter work to populations of children insufficiently served at the present. This sounds vaguely saccharine. I have no desire or temperament for sainthood; rather, I am beginning to feel the pull of all my teachers within me to take the next step in giving away what I know about teaching to the next generation. It is a wonderful feeling: standing on the shoulders of all my teachers, I am using my multi-influenced words to teach how words influence the development of every child. It is a great joy.

Advice for New Teachers

"To learn, read

To think, write

To master, teach"

Every teacher has a unique life history and set of reasons that affected the choice to become a teacher. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote that you knew you were a poet if you could not do otherwise. For me teaching was like that. I do not believe that university teaching is always or even usually like that. For many (and sometimes for me) teaching is the vehicle for conducting research. My advice to the youngest members of our profession is to question unflinchingly what teaching means to them and to ask what they might do to make teaching a vehicle for their most profoundly felt, intellectual goals. Teaching can be the most satisfying of life's pursuits because in the act of teaching, we are forced to sharpen, refine, and articulate what we know. Socrates, who never wrote a word, taught us the power at the heart of teaching: at its best we become partners in a dialogue about knowledge, its sources, its lacunae, and its potential for contributing to the formation of virtue in the individual and in society. I would like to think that my teaching of the next generation continues that pursuit in the next and the next generation. That is a life worth living.

This page was first posted online on November 12, 2005 and was last updated on November 12, 2005

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