I
My intermediate level class, an introduction to literature, is bombing and it is in part because those who can read, do not want to, and those who want to, cannot. I have been using an anthology for this class and it is the one used for such classes nationwide. Up until now it has worked rather well but this is the second time in the past five years the class has bombed due to the rima abrazada or perhaps the conceit of the students who can read but do not wish to, and those who wish to but cannot. The anthology is designed for a middle level of expertise and willingness, and if nobody in the class is a member of the target audience, things fall apart and our marriage to the anthology makes things worse. Of course I tend to think this means I cannot teach.
One could say that the current group of students is an anomaly, carry on, the course will be better next time, but I have reason to believe that the audience we imagine for this course is in fact the anomaly. There are so many e-texts and other online media available that I have been considering discarding the anthology next time in favor of a website I might build for the course, so that we would have greater flexibility and lower costs. In fact I have already begun building the site, just to see what it would be like.
Today a graduate student from English, doing a dissertation on pedagogy for literature, came to see me because he wants to finish the courses for his foreign literature requirement in the fall. Could I supervise a reading course? Sure, if the books you want to read fit my expertise, I was about to say, before remembering that he is not yet prepared to read whole books in a foreign language. Instead I said, “What if we read poems, stories, essays, and one act plays, with a view to deciding which are the most appropriate and attractive for the introductory class I am thinking of teaching from this website?”
So this pedagogical expert looked at the proto-website and said, “My God! What a wonderful set of materials! This is all contextualized so well! You do have good teaching ideas, don’t you!” It was very interesting. Perhaps the problem is not that I cannot teach, but that I can.
II
I tend to complain that not only the faculty but also the graduate students have middle aged perspectives on the world. Yet despite my continued impression that I am under 30, I am not. I know this because I have been out with the student group whose faculty advisor I now am.
Normally I am hipper than the students and know more things, but these students are very well informed. They can talk about many things I can talk about, but better. They can also talk about many more things I have never heard of. I judge myself redeemed only insofar as I know the bands Rush and Arcade Fire, and I am aware of the torrent (this was impressive to them).
It is in part the stodginess of academia that has always made me want to run in the other direction. I did not feel this way in graduate school but I have had a fight or flight reaction to most campuses I’ve worked at since. The feeling is, more or less, get me out of this asphyxiating tomb! I am too young to die!
III
Last semester my student, a Troop, with whom I had a few conversations because he was having trouble with PTSD, informed me that I also had a mild form of it. I thought about this and decided to give the idea the benefit of the doubt. I asked myself the question, if I did have it, how would I fight it? I came up with some ideas and started implementing them, and they seem to work.
Reeducation wanted one to reexperience everything bad which had ever happened and take it harder this time. I was supposed to “come to understand” that I had been permanently damaged, in ways worse than I could know. Except that the more severe damage, the damage with more potential for permanence, was inflicted by Reeducation itself. My own research, and I do have good research and analytical skills, indicates that this was unscientific, anti-therapeutic, illogical, and bizarre.
IV
Although it comes from Reeducation my PTSD is bound up with academia. That is a reason my job is still so hard for me, and it is also the practical reason (out of the many other kinds of reasons) why I wanted to leave the times I almost have: I had become disabled, at least for this, because universities had been re-encoded for me as psychically unsafe.
I always look bright, and I am the hip one, as well as the unflappable one. What people do not realize is that my hands shake, my stomach does somersaults, and my brain freezes every morning as I open the main door to the building. (I fight this by visualizing a Borges-size library where you can be a flâneur except when called to action, and where, when you are called to action, you are expected to come in with the full force of your intellect.)
On the other hand I remember a certain moment, when work was going well and Reeducation had started but had not yet taken hold, when I thought: “I am satisfied with this. I have now discovered that I can be a successful professor, and that it is somewhat interesting. I am ready to move on.” I still wonder about the meaning of that. I am still trying to unwind these tangled threads.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I think you’re a great teacher. I do think that one’s ability to teach depends on the students’ willingness to learn. There are problems when this attitude is not implanted. When I was trying to teach students of a culture that it is anathema to mention, I was always jumpy. I ended up trying to use my own voice to soothe myself much of the time rather than just to teach. I was listening more to myself than to my students. It was like an echo chamber, but I was always thinking that at least if they came down on me like a ton of bricks, I would be able to defend myself by knowing exactly what I had said at any particular point in the teaching process. Also, at least I was holding my own hand and putting myself into a resolved mindset about this unsavoury business of teaching those who didn’t want to learn. I expected that they would try to find all sorts of flaws in my approach in order to defend themselves from having not learned as well as they should have. That was inevitable. Therefore, I would have to proceed indifferently, with this horror always in the back of my mind, whilst putting on the obligatory cheesy smile. (For not to do so would be to drop another guard.)
Well, this is the contorted posture that enables a teacher to merely survive when survival is all that is possible.
I don’t think we can caricature a set of cultural circumstances that go way beyond caricature into some kind of black magic — deisgned to poison the human soul.
I do enjoy teaching my Japanese students –who have a strong desire to learn something
Black magic, that’s about right. Black magic of capitalism, say I the Marxist avant la lettre (I am a born Marxist, although I have never actually studied Marx and never intended to be a Marxist, it’s just that he has a lot of good elucidations of what actually happens in MY DAILY LIFE!!! 😉 ).
Yes, the capitalist basis of quality control is vapid consumers abusing you.
Thanks for I-IV…I totally relate to teaching literature to those who can read but don’t want to or want to but can’t, coming to terms with no longer being the 20-something or 30-something educator, mentoring TAs who think the 30-something has lost her edge, and even the PTSD among student veterans resembling the PTSD among those brutalized by academia, including me. Thanks for this post!
How to teach a generation where almost everyone is already bored or trodden down, or if they are excited about something, hide it in order not to be laughed at? And this in a university?
This is a beautiful, beautiful text. Thanks for standing up for your smartness and uniqueness and, by extension, for the rest of us.
Okay, I have a crackpot theory about why America has such a problem with the printed page. Every printed sentence is the sum of a given number of syllables (which I will call beats because it’s easier to type, which gives us a clue as to the nature of the problem.)
Assume that the prose most Americans read is ad copy. This may be true to a greater or lesser degree, but there is no doubt we are saturated with it.
Scanning a typical ad, I found that it consisted of five sentences of 3, 20, 17, 12, and 8 beats respectively.
From this, we might assume that the average American, when reading print, looks for closure twenty beats into a sentence, give or take a few.
I am currently reading Istvan Meszaros’ “Beyond Capital”. One of his easier sentences contains 78 beats. I am as conditioned as anyone else to look for closure twenty beats into a sentence. When reading Meszaros, I must make a constant effort to wait until the end of the sentence. When I forget, I simply close down and have to take a deep breath and start again.
Asking the average American student to jump right into even moderately complex prose is like asking a couch potato to run a marathon. There has to be some conditioning, first.
If you are looking for a methodology, there is none. Like I said, this is a crackpot theory that has never been developed or tested.
I am simply throwing it out for what it’s worth.
Case – yes, but I come to the conclusion it is conditioning they have to do for themselves. There are supposedly all of these ways one can coach them but I think too much of this keeps them addicted to training wheels.
Everyone – gracias! I was afraid this post was WHINY.
There are supposedly all of these ways one can coach them but I think too much of this keeps them addicted to training wheels.
Precisely! Suppose that your whole learning experience is based upon your tendency to lean on some authority in order to make headway. Once you are “weaned”, your posture will no doubt still involved a pose of heavy leaning. You have never learned to stand upright.
…But this kind of “leaning” thing is part of what the dominant culture allows itself as a concession based upon its dominance. Other cultures can afford only to be Lean, not Leaning.
Precisely. And some disjointed thoughts I’ve had on this, which should be a post of their own, but I don’t have the energy for it now, are:
+ curriculum planning and program building, on the other hand, give students some places to go and steps to stand on *on their own*, without leaning, but:
+ this is precisely the kind of thing there is no longer a place for in the corporate university. Now we are supposed to have very traditional, pass them through curricula, and people who deal with dissatisfied or failing students are supposed to give them something to lean on, but actually creating a space in which they can learn to stand is not something there is a space for in faculty activity reports today.
(It is one of my big skills, but it is no longer appreciated, and it was a big skill of all the professors I had, and *was* appreciated back then but is not now.)
+ This student, the pedagogical expert, says he does not expect to get an academic job. He likes reading, teaching, and being up to date, but the writing he likes to do is creative writing [although he does not consider himself a Writer], and the place he likes to put his academic intelligence is in curriculum design and research on this.
(One would say that means he should be in Education, but as we know, Education departments are about bureaucracy and are not closely enough connected to the actual disciplines in which one might educate.)
+ This is an interesting problem since he is very bright and professional and engaged. It would *seem* there should be a space for the kind of creative work on curriculum he wants to do within the current mode of academia, but casting his eye about, he appears to believe he is not.
So, he has a technical and abstracting mind rather than one that enjoys content in and for itself. Well if he had that kind of self-knowledge.. maybe he should do an MBA?
In fact he comes from business and has an undergraduate degree in science, and has a good job with that. I think (as he does) that he’s going to end up teaching in a prep school or community college, given his non interest in making a career of writing literary criticism.
But my larger point isn’t about him but about the academic industrial complex: the strong skill he does have is one that is needed, but is no longer part of the “skill set” required of professors. Nowadays even academic advising is outsourced to professional advisors who are not professors. In this panorama, a specialist in curriculum building would be a good addition to a department, since everything is now so compartmentalized. (Which doesn’t mean I’m for that or for the creation of such a position, it’s a comment on how odd it is that that particular skill, a necessary one, is no longer valued.)
Perhaps my comment here is all too colored by the state of things at universities like mine. On the other hand, as I always say, what happens at the margins of the global North (so to speak) is usually a harbinger of what happens at the center.
This academic advising out-sourcing is a disease. We have an academic adviser who tells students which courses to avoid on the basis of his own experience as an undergrad in our department and *his* ideas of what an appropriate learning experience is. So sometimes we are undercut by our support staff before we even walk in to the classroom.