“How Agassiz Taught Professor Scudder” (Blackboard)
Consider the way Professor Agassiz dealt with his student. It would have taken a lot less time if Agassiz had simply explained bilateral symmetry, and then gone on to other things. Why didn’t he do it that way? Can you learn anything from this reading and from the Professor’s teaching technique that you can apply to your own university studies?
This piece was written 150 years ago, and two or three things have changed since then. One is that biological science has advanced enormously (and, unfortunately, Professor Agassiz’s theories about the classification of animals have proven unworkable). Another is that educated writers in 1874 could make assumptions about their readers—assumptions we cannot make any more. Scudder could assume that his readers were familiar with Shakespeare, so when he said that the alcohol had “a very ancient and fishlike smell,” readers would have picked up the reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. One of the oddities of the information age we live in is that general readers know a lot less than they did 150 years ago. (Your defense is to do what I did: Highlight the questionable words, right-click them, and choose “Search with Google.” You don’t have to remain in the dark when an author makes an allusion you don’t understand.) A third difference, related to the second, is that authors in the 19th century were unafraid to use high level vocabulary. Today’s printed publications tend to pitch low. (Newsweek magazine, considered to be fairly intellectual, is written on a ninth grade reading level. Internet reading level is lower.)
What all this means for you is that you may need to swallow your pride and do some dictionary work—a lot of it—to get through Agassiz. I considered writing up a glossary, but I decided against that because, in the spirit of the Professor, I thought you might get more from figuring things out for yourself. Two warnings:
I phrased the assignment as questions, but you haven’t really finished the work when you come up with short answers to those questions. You need to craft a thesis statement and an essay which begins with those questions and makes a mature statement. I’m looking for an essay, not a pair of bullet points. Those questions aren’t necessarily your outline.
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Revised 11/10/23 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.