"Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University"
About this Quote
A wry shrug from a novelist who distrusted grand claims, the line undercuts the gravitas usually attached to academia and replaces it with dry, self-deprecating humor. Robert B. Parker spent years at Northeastern University before his crime fiction, especially the Spenser series, gave him license to leave the classroom for the page. He had the credentials and the post, but he also had a hard-boiled sensibility that preferred lean action to institutional abstraction. Calling teaching too strong a word is less an insult to students than a joke at his own expense and, gently, at the academy’s tendency to inflate titles and impact.
The phrasing suggests skepticism about how much a professor can transmit, particularly in the arts. Parker wrote about moral choices in concrete situations, and his prose prized immediacy. That worldview does not sit easily with the idea that craft or vision can be packaged and delivered. Whatever it was I did hints that what happened in his classroom was looser, more conversational, more about presence than pedagogy, the kind of mentoring that resists syllabi and rubrics. It also implies he saw himself not as a capital-T Teacher but as a working writer passing through.
There is modesty here, but also a stance. Parker’s novels mistrust cant and puffery. The joke punctures the solemnity around the professoriate while affirming a belief that writing is learned by doing, by reading, by living, not by lectures alone. At the same time, the line warms to the idea that influence can be real even if it is hard to name. Whatever it was carries a hint of affection, the memory of conversations and rough-cut guidance that would be diminished by more elevated language. The remark captures his tone: laconic, sly, and anchored in practice rather than theory, a writer’s way of saying that his truest lessons were found on the page.
The phrasing suggests skepticism about how much a professor can transmit, particularly in the arts. Parker wrote about moral choices in concrete situations, and his prose prized immediacy. That worldview does not sit easily with the idea that craft or vision can be packaged and delivered. Whatever it was I did hints that what happened in his classroom was looser, more conversational, more about presence than pedagogy, the kind of mentoring that resists syllabi and rubrics. It also implies he saw himself not as a capital-T Teacher but as a working writer passing through.
There is modesty here, but also a stance. Parker’s novels mistrust cant and puffery. The joke punctures the solemnity around the professoriate while affirming a belief that writing is learned by doing, by reading, by living, not by lectures alone. At the same time, the line warms to the idea that influence can be real even if it is hard to name. Whatever it was carries a hint of affection, the memory of conversations and rough-cut guidance that would be diminished by more elevated language. The remark captures his tone: laconic, sly, and anchored in practice rather than theory, a writer’s way of saying that his truest lessons were found on the page.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
|---|
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
