Customer Reviews

Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue

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I wish this book had been published by a mainstream, New York publisher. Every professor -- especially every woman who considers an academic career -- should read this book and Gail Griffin's second, Season of the Witch.

Griffin (or Gail, as she'd probably prefer) writes an unsparing, honest account of her life as a college professor at a small "teaching institution." What's rare -- and what probably kept this book out of the mainstream -- is her ability to integrate literature with life. She must be an incredible teacher. Her brief descriptions of classroom discussion motivated me to search out some books I would have missed otherwise, notably The Color Purple.

As a career coach/consultant, I noted that Gail Griffin reveals her own career sensitivity. She instinctively chose a college where her unique talents would flourish. As she writes, she felt at home right away, although she fought the feeling. Like most new assistant professors, fresh from a prestigious graduate school, she had been taught to value scholarship -- articles in high-powered journals -- over teaching. In the language of career counseling, she created a career that expressed her own value system and seems to serve her life purpose.

As an ex-professor, I can appreciate Griffin's challenge at tiny Kalamazoo College. Staying intellectually keen while teaching only undergraduates calls for a unique discipline, motivation and, above all, sense of oneself. I couldn't have done it: I taught the jaded MBAs that some of Griffin's students became.

If I were teaching a course on careers, especially academic careers, this book would be on the list. I can't help comparing it to the gloomier but also brilliantly written Cliff Walk,
which would also be required reading. Griffin herself might pick up a gender subtext, far better than I could.
I wish she'd write another book and get a big-name publisher
to pick it up.

I can't praise this book highly enough. I wish that I'd discovered and read this much earlier: it has honestly breathed new life into me. Griffin is a champion for teaching as an inextricable part of the life of the mind and a life's mission, rather than as simply a way to pay the bills in academia. Her even-handed, insightful analysis of the differences gender make in and out of the classroom made me breathe a sigh of relief. There is real genius in the connections she draws between her inspired analyses of history and literature and the daily life of a college campus. And, as if all this were not enough, Griffin's prose is gorgeous--a true delight to read.

I suspect that this book hasn't gotten wider attention because it defies the usual divisions of academic work: it is neither a work of cultural studies nor a theory of pedagogy, because it is both. If things were as they should be, though, work like this would be the standard, and not the exception.