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IN THE CLASSROOM
“Silence is Suspect”

The Individual Student

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Well he had this kind of mantra. A lot of people say it, but most faculty don’t deliver on it: The liberal arts begins with the student, with the individual student. And the implication of that is that you have to get to know your students, you have to know who they are, what they […]
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Bob would never discuss education apart from the practice, the reality of a particular person, this class, this text. He refused to discuss education abstractly. So the conversation was constant about students and he was very insistent on the primacy of knowing your students. That is finding out what they believed and whether they really […]
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“Don, where did you come from?” “Tell me about your brother.” “Tell me about your sister.” “How was your father educated? “ “What’s your mother’s family like?” “Are your people close to each other? “ “What’s your economic outlook on life?” This was the mosaic that he would put together of you as his student. […]
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I got very hooked, largely through him, on philosophy and theology and so my senior year first term schedule was just essentially 100% filled with, except for my Poli-Ec major course, with abstract courses. And I talked to Gaudino about it and he said, “But Mr. Lewis, you must remember where ‘The Republic’ takes place. […]
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Sometimes three weeks or a month later he’d ask someone to reconcile what they had said to someone three weeks earlier.
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I do remember the first time that I had a feeling that he had noticed me in any way. There was a man who was going to speak on campus from the Freedom Democratic Party, which was the wing of the Democratic Party in the South, particularly in Mississippi, that had staged an insurrection of […]
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I think all of us had the feeling in the early-70s, beginning with the students who came as transfers from these other colleges, the classroom changed. Not that women would ask different questions, but women would sometimes be more participative in class then men. Bob and I talked about this. I said, “Bob, have you […]
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I was in the second class of women and a group of us went through a very intensive class with him, a junior level class that was on political philosophy and I had never taken politics or philosophy and I was halfway terrified. I had come from a public school and I was here on […]
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I think what people love about Gaudino, you know, people love themselves, and thus they mostly loved Gaudino because he asked you questions about yourself, which is very different than suggesting who you should be or whatever. He reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi in terms of how we read about him, because when Gaudino was […]
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