A Fresh Perspective

Addison Independent, May 5, 2011

It’s a little-known trade secret that teachers learn as much from their students as their students learn from them. A fresh set of eyes can cast new light on an old problem, not to mention the fact that young eyes often see further than old eyes. And sometimes, the students are just wiser than we are.  It’s about perspective.

Per-spective:  from the Latin roots per (“through”) and specio (“look at”).  Perspicuity (“mental penetration; insight”).  Perspicacity (“clearness of understanding or insight; great mental penetration; discernment”). All of these words show us how much how we understand is related to how we see.

There are plenty of new perspectives and fresh eyes in my seminar on the history of science, technology and magic in the Middle Ages this semester. Though it is a history class, we meet in McCardell Bicentennial Hall (the science building), and several of the students in the class are in the sciences, not in history. When a chemistry student looks at a medieval alchemical recipe, she can compare it to a lab report. My science students make a discussion on inductive vs. deductive reasoning in alchemical theory and practice infinitely richer. And when I ask the question “is alchemy more like magic or pre-modern chemistry?” the scientists enter the discussion from a different place, and their non-historical perspective enlightens us all.

Sometimes those young eyes are truly perspicacious. One of my students, Zachary Fenster, participated in the Middlebury College Student Research Symposium recently, presenting his research on a particularly fascinating cache of medieval documents known as the Cairo Genizah.  Zach took the session title “Negotiation of Difference” and turned it into a way of thinking about History writ large: interpreting the past is all about negotiating differences of time and of space.

I had never thought of my discipline quite that way before. As a historian, it is indeed my job to negotiate my difference (and difference’s opposite, similarity) with the subjects of my inquiry. Time is the difference that is most obvious, but space is no less important, especially since it changes so radically over time.

Think about Vermont. Jan Albers’ book Hands on the Land showed many of us how much the Vermont landscape has changed: what are now forests used to be pastures that used to be forests. Think of the vanished hamlets like Hillsboro, Old Brandon, and Bingo. What was it like to live there, work there, or love there?  When you see a stone wall, or a line of maples along a road, or a bunch of apple trees lost in the woods, imagine the historical people who built, cultivated, and planted them.

The differences that surprise you may be the most important. The beautiful two-story Lampson School on the hill above River Road in New Haven Mills is an example I pass by all the time. Why would such a large schoolhouse be located in such a tiny community? The 1868 Lampson School is one of the few structures that outlived the series of disasters (most especially the devastating flood of 1927) that destroyed the mills and decimated the population of New Haven Mills.  Now, when I look down at the river just there, I see not just a swimming hole, but a place where people worked and lived. If we listen to our eyes, they can teach us to negotiate the differences of space and time – the history – all around us.

Zach taught me to think about history as negotiating difference. The students in History 400 teach me to see history through the eyes of scientists. It was a student who told me stories about Bingo, and another who told me about discovering Old Brandon on a walk through the woods behind Otter Valley High School. A former student helps me to edit this column. My students are so often my teachers.

As Rabbi Hanina said in the Babylonian Talmud:  “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, most from my students.”  Amen.

Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke:  The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).