Roundtable on Pedagogy: Response: Curiosity as Pedagogy

Abstract

THE POET ROBERT FROST had a forty-plus-year association with Amherst College, a fact proudly featured on its website. However, the school discreetly notes that beginning in 1926, less than a decade after his faculty appointment, the poet's “formal teaching duties ended,” and he held “informal classes and readings rather than running regular course assignments” (http://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/holdings/frost). Although the website gives no reason for his change in duties—other than a vague allusion to Frost's view of teaching as a distraction from writing poetry—I think I know why Frost never resumed formal teaching: Robert Frost refused to assign grades. I know this because my college philosophy professor was a student of Frost's at Amherst in the 1920s, and he often told us stories about his experience in Frost's classroom. The story we especially admired (and wished our professor would emulate) related the day during class when the college registrar timidly knocked on Frost's door and asked to speak to him. Frost ignored the registrar until the knocks became unbearably loud and he refused to leave, insisting that Frost must assign final grades for his students from the past semester. In a dramatic gesture of indifference and defiance, Frost swept his arms across his desk, delivering the student work piled up there into the wastepaper basket. “I might as well do that as give them a grade,” he pronounced to a cheering class and a bemused registrar.