Instead, I see among my students a dispiriting amount of cynicism about teachers and contempt for learning except as a hurdle over which one must jump on the road to some lucrative career. Some students imagine they will advance on the basis of having a degree, even if their words and manners indicate that they are unsuitable for any kind of job that involves dealing with people. They seem completely unaware that knowing how to behave will have a serious impact on their future prospects.And...
But my larger concern here is not just that students behave disrespectfully toward their professors. It is that they are increasingly disrespectful to one another, to the point that a serious student has more trouble coping with the behavior of his or her fellow students than learning the material.Maybe it's the French aristocrat, or the American Southerner in me, but civility and basic good manners really do make the day and the one's life go along more smoothly. They make the bearer of these qualities liked and respected by others. They are not a sign of capitulation to The Authorities. Take Oscar Wilde, or Mae West for your examples. Even Henry Rollins likes to remind us that being good to each other is the greatest form of rebellion -- if we're nice to each other, we have more energy for taking on the Real Bastards.
And the prof, Thomas Benton, is lovely in his concern for the social well being, as well as the learning, of his students. But I think there's a connection he missed. He mentions the lack of preparation students even at elite schools now have for college, for real study, for thinking at all. I think there's a link here. They're young, they're left ignorant and intellectually defenseless by their public educations, and much of the misbehavior he's talking about may be a defense mechanism against being unprepared by their previous educations for the demands on them college makes by its very nature.
I applaud Benton's sympathy here. Some of the behaviors he talks about can be addressed by departmental policy: do X, and you have to leave the class. It's top-down authoritative bossiness that Hums types don't like, but it gives a prof some leverage with which to create a functioning learning environment.
I'm a tough teacher, and a playful smart aleck. My students get this early on. If I can make zinging jokes about TS Eliot, what, they wonder, might I be able to say about living people? In my Comp class, I decided to teach composition methods and critical thinking in the genre of the personal essay. (I was bored with trad. comp pedagogy.) Which, by its very nature, is personal, it exposes, it explores, it's risky. And I made my students read their essays aloud to the class to get feedback, and to hear for themselves which sentences and paragraphs didn't work. -- If you can't read it well out loud, something needs revision. -- Now, I had graphic design geeks, and fashion design fashionistas, interior designers and architects, videographers , chefs, and so on, and Evangelical Christians, angry little atheists, homophobes, and gay and lesbian students, and emos and punks, and some kids who were clinically depressed, and some who were too cool for school, some who thought of education as tantamount to spiritual salvation, who drove H2s and who could barely afford the bus, who were from The Barrio and The Bubble, who were 18 and 42 years old -- the whole nine. Most also didn't have oodles of life experience and were not going to hit me with Montaigne level essays. They were going to reflect on and write about and explore their lives thus far. Dan-ger-0us to do in a crowd of people who might decided to eat you alive. So I made a rule: Comments will be constructive, polite, and supportive. No one will dis/slam/or attack anyone else, no name calling and no political fights. Anyone who goes on the attack will deal not with their attackee, but with Me, and I will bring the full bore of my wit and desire to defend the underdog against you and reduce you to emotional ribbons should you choose to be a jerk in this class. I was not kidding, and they knew it.
Guess what: they were really nice to each other, and they helped each other with their essays, and came to really like reading together and listening together. Which, I had also told them was part of the whole damn point. They gave each other writer's critiques and reader's responses, and the Evangelical didn't tell the gay kid he was going to hell for loving another boy. The boys got hear what and how girls were thinking about life, and the girls got hear the boys. People made friends across "tribal" lines and at a commuter school. Everyone was told that there was no need to expose the deepest secret, that the point of the essay was not so much confession as considered exploration, learning on the page, using compositional strategies and the writing process. And they Loved It. They liked the formal freedom of the essay, the process of analyzing these free-form explorations for how they employed "the rules" and bent them at the same time. They Loved It. And they learned to listen to each other with one agenda: to help make each other better writers.
But, I set it up to work that way, and they knew just how cutting my wit could be because I used it on Big Authorities Who Were Sometimes Wrong or Silly. I gave Darwin a hard time for not understanding the role of local cataclysm in evolution, complete with eye-rolls, and Izzard-style sarcasm. "What? You mean the strongest and the smartest buffalo is never, ever taken out by earthquake or fast moving grass fire? Reeeeeeallly?"
One of my favorite mottoes was the motto for my classes: Be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle. You can't always see the battle on the outside, out on our cool and collected veneers, but everyone has their demons, their doubts, their dopplegangers, and that's reason enough to just be kind. And in my classes, you be kind, or you go the fuck back to your dorm room.
It's amazing what enforcing student codes of conduct and one's own course policies can do.
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In the world of my recovery, btw, I've moved back to my room. Sleeping in my bed does not result in anymore pain in the A.M. than sleeping in the chair upstairs, which is to say that my arm hurts like there is a swarm of hyperactive wasps in there in the morning. But, I get to be with my cats, and wake up to black bird song instead of the coffee percolator. I do prefer the black birds and wasps to the percolator and wasps.
I can feel my left arm getting weaker. Ick. I'm not at all certain that I will be medically able to go to Ohio or Ireland for job interviews, but I will go anyway. I'm getting pretty good at operating with one arm and on percocet (which I'm taking 1/2 a tab of now). So, you know, that and a four hour nap everyday (you'd be surprised how exhausting this all is), and I'll get along.
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