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IN THE CLASSROOM
“Silence is Suspect”

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The first page of the syllabus had rules about how we were going to behave, rules about the classroom. In order to learn we had to build spaces. They were artificial, man-made, they were not natural. Learning is an unnatural act, difficult, not easily done, so we had to be very careful about the space […]
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I had Mr. Gaudino freshman year and I’ll always remember him sitting at the end of the table and asking me, “What does that mean substantively, Mr. Himowitz?” I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I didn’t know what “substantively” meant.
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I think I spent the whole time just writing down everything he said.
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I can see him, you know, sort of elfin and short. I know we were reading Plato and Aristotle. We may have gone up to Augustine and Machiavelli. It was kind of a fairly standard set of political theory texts. I can’t remember Gaudino’s particular interpretation much as I remember his method. I think the […]
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Freshman year took Political Science 101, engaged with the text, bell rang, the class was over. But Mr. Gaudino’s classes were never over. When I walked out of the class that fall day, with a classmate of mine, Jim Boynton, the two of us couldn’t stop talking. We just became lifelong friends and the triggering […]
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In order to be an honors major in political science you had to take a Methods seminar and it was in what was then called Mather House, which is now where the Admissions Office is, I think. It was up in the second floor in a little room, and there were about 10 of us […]
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Here was another rule: you kept your ego outside. This was a place where we would be brutally honest with each other but we wouldn’t be unkind. We wouldn’t be inhumane. The classroom was a special place. We had to work hard. He thought learning changed you. It wasn’t what you memorized. It wasn’t the […]
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My first class with him was Political Science 101 in the fall of 1967. It may have been like the second class that I ever attended in college. It was in Greylock, in one of those kind of antiseptic, sterile conference rooms. It was primarily freshmen with a few sophomores and everybody was seated around […]
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He was the first person that I’d met in a long time who really knew how to listen.
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I took Gaudino’s class in a little meeting room in Greylock, an afternoon class. The class was meant to be an hour and a half, or an hour and a quarter, and it went on three hours, up until dinner time. I came out of it shaking. It was one of the first times I […]
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