Art & Creativity Quote by A. Bartlett Giamatti

Giamatti frames teaching less as a job you clock into and more as a lived faculty: an "instinctual art". That pairing matters. "Instinctual" rejects the fantasy that good teaching is merely technique, metrics, or compliance; "art" refuses the notion that it can be reduced to a replicable script. Coming from a scholar-administrator who moved between the classroom and the institutional machine, the line reads like a subtle rebuke to bureaucratic schooling before the word "accountability" became a national obsession.

The syntax does quiet rhetorical work. Instead of talking about content delivered, he stacks verbs of attention and desire: "mindful of potential, craving of realizations". Teaching, in this view, is oriented toward what students are not yet. The teacher becomes a kind of attentive conductor of possibility, but the word "craving" complicates the saintly stereotype. It admits ego and hunger: the teacher wants to witness the moment when latent ability turns into something actual. That admission feels honest, even a little dangerous, because it exposes how much of education runs on hope mixed with impatience.

Then the rhythm shifts: "a pausing, seamless process". "Pausing" acknowledges restraint, timing, the willingness not to force growth on a schedule. "Seamless" suggests continuity - the lesson doesn’t end at the bell; it threads through feedback, revision, silence, and return. Subtext: the best teaching is often invisible, experienced as flow rather than spectacle, and judged poorly by systems that only recognize what can be counted on demand.