Confessions of a Summer-School Teacher

Abstract

I HAVE done a good deal of summer-school teaching. Some of my academic friends seem to think this a shameful admission, and I must allow that their arguments against the practice have weight. It is quite true, for instance, that teaching in a summer school is not usually a vacation. Classes are often smaller than in the regular sessions, but the actual teaching hours are likely to be at least as numerous. Six or eight weeks of summer teaching is generally quite as exacting as the same period of time in the winter. There is some danger that one may approach the fall opening of college with a slightly fed-up feeling; and this is a serious objection. It is true also that a man who is carrying a full schedule in a summer school is not likely to make much headway on research projects during the vacation months. Certainly he is not getting on with the magnum opus or turning out learned articles so rapidly as he might if he devoted himself chiefly to those ends. Though the loss to the world may not be very great, the handicap to the individual may be serious in a profession where advancement depends largely on publication. But there are, as I shall try to show, compensations apart from the additional salary. I was glad to hear a friend who has taught in as many summer schools as I have, and who is a scholar of distinction, make this confession: spite of all they say of the folly of summer teaching, I have never yet refused a summerschool job unless I had already accepted another one. I have taught in the summer sessions of eight institutions; taking them from east to west across the country, they are Maine, New Hampshire, Harvard, Indiana, Michigan, Northwestern, Colorado, and Oregon. In two of these, Harvard and New