Most academic conversations about teaching are entirely centered on pedagogy this, classroom management that, course design the other thing. Occasionally the traits of a gifted rhetorician are acknowledged – sense of humor and adaptability primary among them. The image that emerges is of a Teacher divorced from time and space, and especially from body — an ideal emblem, or perhaps a set of templates.

Sometimes teachers conform eerily to that abstract emblem or those templates. We encounter Inspiring Teacher Movie types in real life. Or as in the case of one of my mentors, we get pure, streamlined pedagogy and cold critique hauntingly detached from the rest of the universe.

But much more often, what makes a perfectly ordinary teaching moment inspiring or delightful or compelling is a very basic trait, or an amalgam of very basic traits, that has nothing to do with pedagogy per se.

One of my professors here at Brit Uni — we’ll call him the Heretic — shows up every week with absolutely no sign that he’s prepared anything at all for the class. He brings no notes, most times no books. He sits down, takes a deep breath, plants his hands on the table and says, “Right.” And then we just start looking at whatever old volume is sitting in front of us, floating ideas into the ether until something catches. Then it gets animated. Just like any other conversation.

I learn a great deal from those conversations — it must be said, the Heretic is horribly erudite and he carries his erudition well. He’s also very critically savvy, and as heretical in his approaches to the study of literature as are the subjects of his research in their approaches to theology. An intellectual delight.

But sometimes the things I learn from him have nothing at all to do with that. The mechanical things I take notes on and the more transcendent things I am learning have very little in common.

Yesterday I noticed for the first time that the Heretic has an extraordinarily lovely voice, and that he reads aloud beautifully. He read to us from Florio’s Montaigne, a particular bit I had deemed on first glance irredeemably insane. But steeped in the rich modulations of the Heretic’s voice, it gathered sense and beauty. I suddenly understood it. I could not have experienced those words the way I did yesterday morning except through the totally incidental fact of my teacher’s voice.

This has happened before — Fierce Emerita at the Petri Dish had an incantatory way of reading aloud that drew me into the beauty of poems I was eager to cast aside. She spoke in long, wild sentences whose syntax was nevertheless always impeccably intact. You could hear her semi-colons and parentheses. The notes I took in her classes were maps of her sentences, some of which ran to more than a page. There is little that I can listen to for two hours without tiring, but the long, slow sentences of Fierce Emerita, in her soft, wise voice, those I often felt I could just move into and inhabit forever.

It can’t be taught or learned. It may be a matter of taste — some might find Heretic’s reading noisome or Emerita’s speech convoluted. But a trait like voice is sometimes the catalyst that brings a student closer to her mentor, or draws her round to a new vision, or simply refreshes her.

Perhaps another way of looking at it would be to say that, after all, there’s as much metaphysics to the classroom as there is metrics. My hope in fact is that there’s more.