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| When Teacher's Back is Turned Jacob Taanmann |
Her Students Surprise Her
Professor Josephine K surveyed her
classroom. It was ugly. The cinder block walls were painted the gray-green of
old pus. A misguided architect had placed this classroom's single row of hopper
windows so high so that no student or teacher could glimpse outside. Spring was
out there. Winter's monochrome and claustrophobia had retreated. Eye-popping
color and wide open spaces replaced snow and cold. This wasn't a prestigious university,
but you couldn't tell that from the grounds. Acres of rolling, green hills
seemed to extend all the way to the Manhattan skyline. Professor K was on this
campus so long ago that she remembered the World Trade Center punctuating that
skyline.
Overhead fluorescent lights seemed to
tinge everyone in the class with a touch of gray-green. Prof. K was always
surprised when she had to make a library or conference run to the nearest Ivy
League school. Ivy League students all looked like they'd stepped out of a
Vanity Fair multi-page ad for designer clothes. Perfect teeth, posture, hair, accessories.
Not on this campus. These students were
up all night working at a bakery. Or these students were first generation and
their mamas proved to themselves that they'd overcome homeland oppression and
poverty by stuffing their children with Little Debbie Cakes until they were
obese. Or these students were, for reasons Prof. K might never know, without
easy access to bathroom facilities and basic hygiene rituals. Prof. K liked to
move around the classroom, and she always had to brace herself passing through
some students' territories; the odor was gag-inducing. Clothes were never new,
always whatever was closest to hand. Even the youngest faces were etched with
anxiety; prescription-or-recreational-drug-induced lethargy; or the kind of
sadness that should only drench the face of a much older person. And then there
were the faces ready for combat, the kind of facial expression that silently
shouts, "You want a piece of me?"
What would a stranger see who walked
into this room? An obese girl whose leggings barely completed the forced march
around her buttocks; leggings that not only didn't conceal, but that enhanced
to topographic-map-intensity, the cottage-cheese-like cellulite of her thighs. The
boy with the nervous tick. A short, skinny kid whose mere physical appearance
seemed an engraved invitation that any bully could decipher. A 19-year-old girl
sneaking glances at her phone because she left her two toddlers in her parked
car. She couldn't pay the daycare bill.
The one thing they all had in common was
that they had nothing in common. A few were black, but "black" meant
born in Newark, NJ, to descendants of slaves. Or born in Guyana and spent early
years barefoot and in a shack. Or born to two doctor immigrants from Nigeria
and now a straight A student and headed to a free ride at an Ivy League grad
school. A few were white and "white" meant a very good high school
student who was cut from his college of choice because they weren't taking any
more white males; rejected by his dream, he came to this campus, and has
resented it ever since. "White" also meant a 17-year-old cancer
survivor, not assured of many more years, but getting a college degree just in
case they come up with a permanent cure. In any case fulfilling the dream of
going to college was better than sitting at home, passively waiting for the
Grim Reaper. Many students were various versions of the catchall term,
"Hispanic:" Caribbean, Mexican, Peruvian.
That's what a stranger would see. That's
what Prof. K saw when she first walked into the class, five months before. She
saw an ugly room and students who didn't look happy, or even capable of
happiness.
That very first day, as she always did on
every first day, she required all students to introduce themselves and one
other student to the class. She learned that the girl in the overstuffed
leggings was writing a romance novel – and was producing publishable prose. She
learned that the angry white boy was taking care of a father with lung damage
caused by his work as a fireman. She learned that the frail looking student
lived in a haunted house. She didn't believe in ghosts, but his account was
mighty convincing.
Over the course of the semester, this
ugly room and its ragtag students was transformed from a pumpkin to a magical
carriage, just like in the old Disney Cinderella cartoon. Prof. K would be
crying when she exited this room. Today was the last day. It had been one heck
of a semester. But, then, it was always one heck of a semester.
The four, ugly walls of this classroom
were her castle keep. She had to push so much out, to nurture anything of value
within.
"Oh, yes, I let them use their
phones in class. So what if they are playing games or doing Facebook? If they
are not interested in the class, that is not my concern." "Sure, let
them arrive late. This is a commuter campus. They are coming from jobs. We have
to be flexible." "Oh, all my students call me by my first name."
Prof. Josephine K heard her fellow professors voice these opinions of modern
pedagogy. Prof. K wanted all of that kept out of her classroom, as if it were
the plague, a microbiological threat to the life she hoped to cultivate. A life
that many of her students had never been exposed to.
She demanded that they arrive on time. That
they put their phones away. That they raise their hands and be recognized
before speaking. That they address their fellow students by name, and make eye
contact with them. That they read. Write. Think.
Prof. K remembered that terrifying phone
call on the first day of the semester. It was her boss. Why would a boss call
her at home? She hadn't felt this nervous since nuns called her parents to
report an infraction. Her boss told her that her syllabus had traumatized a
student, and the student had complained to a dean. "Your syllabus says
that students must attend class if they want to pass. We can't make such
extreme demands."
She wanted to dig a moat around her
classroom. She wanted to erect high, impenetrable walls. She wanted control
over the drawbridge, to allow in, only, that which served her goal. She wanted
her students to think.
Her syllabus told students to go to the
bathroom before and after class, not during class. This shocked them. Not to
wear baseball caps in class. "Apparel communicates to the body, and to the
audience: this is what I am about. We are not here as part of a sporting or
social event. We are here to serve truth." Students would get up and
charge out of the room, with promises to report her.
"Report me? Get in line,"
she'd say.
She was ready to be hated. She was ready
to be fired. But she was determined to teach. Because she was once one of them.
She was once the fat girl coming off of an eight-hour shift as a nurse's aide, still
wearing a pink polyester uniform; or from cleaning houses, still smelling of
Clorox; or with sawdust in her eyebrows, after doing the university's carpentry,
to make school possible. She was dyslexic, outside of her natal culture, not
speaking her first language. And she had discovered, in classrooms like this,
truth. And she wanted others to have access to that.
The other professors taught a relativism
that mocked the very idea of truth. She wanted, within this castle keep, to let
students know that truth matters, and that they could get as close to truth as
anyone else, using time-tested methods inherited through Western Civilization
from the Greeks on down.
Truth is abstract. How to communicate that
abstraction to someone whose first language is not English? How to communicate
the value of truth to someone who is just attending college to go through the
motions necessary to get a degree? How to inspire students whose friends didn't
get degrees, but made good money, legally or not? How to bring on board
students whose friends did stick it out, who laid out the massive expense for
tuition, and ended up working produce at Shoprite? How to get past the message
from parents who somehow both wanted a child with a college degree, but who had
complete contempt for intellectual activity? Who actually punished their
children for "wasting time" by reading when they should be looking
after abuela? How to communicate to that student that this wasn't going to be
like other classes, where you didn't show up, or showed up late, or showed up
on time and used your phone to text with your friends throughout class, and
still got an A, if you could, at the last minute, pump out a three-page paper
on how oppressed you were and how much America sucked?
"You've just been told that you
have a brain tumor," she said to her students. "Or your mother. Or
your kid. A brain tumor. What do you do? You go to the internet. You find a
website that recommends that you drink apple cider vinegar and take coffee enemas.
You do that, then, right? Because you found it on the internet. So it must be
true, right?"
The students would stare at Prof. K. Were
they supposed to be taking notes? Would "Coffee enemas cure cancer"
be on the final exam? The embittered, smart white guy couldn't wait till class
was over, and he could tell those high school friends, who had gone on to more
prestigious universities but who had stuck with him through his disappointment,
that he was paying tuition to hear some lunatic tell him that coffee enemies
cure brain tumors. Which had nothing to do with the subject matter, and wasn't
on the syllabus at all.
"It's not true," she finally
said to her students. "You know it's not true. Coffee and cider vinegar
don't cure cancer. Look, you can speak up in this class. If someone says
something absurd, you can object. You should object. Every time you sit still
when a professor says something absurd to you, you are practicing to be a cog.
Not your best self. Not an integral, thinking, being made in the image and
likeness of God. Not an active participant in democracy. The key is to object
in a civil, scholarly way. Don't shout or throw tomatoes or post an anonymous
critical comment online along with my name and address. Tell me to my face why
you know something is not true. Why you know that if you, or someone
you love, God forbid, is diagnosed with cancer, you will not dose that
person with vinegar and coffee."
And they'd be stumped. How do you
differentiate between fact and fiction? The standard in other classes worked
like this: My tribe, true; enemy tribe, false. A "white man" was not
my tribe. Without that standard, how do you find truth? And then how do you
disagree without cancel culture's tools of rage? These questions segued into the
semester-long conversation about the scientific method, and peer-reviewed
scholarship, and cui bono, and Occam's razor – all terms they seem never to
have heard, previously.
She remembered meetings with other, tenured
and tenure-track professors. These meetings always seemed to begin with a joke
about how stupid the students were, and how much better it would be to be on a
more prestigious campus, though the view of Manhattan's skyline reminded
professors why they wanted to be here. With good traffic, you could make it
downtown in an hour. But, yes, it would be so much better for the career if one
had better graduate students with whom to conduct serious research.
Prof. K wanted to scream during those
comments. The tenured professors weren't just talking about their students, they
were talking about her students, and they were talking about her.
Similar professors from similar prestigious universities had said similar,
disparaging things about her and her classmates when she was an undergrad
decades ago. Ultra-liberal professors with hip "No Nukes," "Save
the Whales," "My Other Car Is a Broom" "Love Makes a
Family," and "McGovern" bumper stickers would say, in class, to
their students' faces, that the nature of a less prestigious school made it
difficult, if not impossible, to get to the heart of this essay, this poem,
this theory, this work of art. There was this better world out there –
Greenwich Village, Princeton, Cambridge, Provincetown – where the really smart,
sophisticated people hung out. And this artist, this theory, this theorem,
would be understood there. By the better people. Who, it was understood,
would not, as most of these students did, attend church, or live at home with
their parents, or work blue-collar jobs, or vote Nixon, or feel constrained by
having been brainwashed by capitalism and the bourgeois work ethic.
"Our students are not mentally
retarded!" Prof. K shouted, more vehemently than she had hoped, at one
staff meeting. "They can learn just as much as anyone! We just have to
raise the bar and make sure that they make it over that raised bar. As long as
we keep lowering the bar, as long as we keep assigning A grades for mediocre
work, we sabotage our students. It's not fair for us to complain about their
performance when we are the ones shaping their performance with our teaching,
our evaluations, and our expectations."
Everyone stared at her. The meeting
paused. And then it picked up again, and no one referred back to what she said.
But the "Our students are so
inferior" lament was not the worst thing she heard at a staff meeting. Nor
was the frequent and gratuitous knocking of Christianity. The worst thing she
heard was "Our students would have no interest in / ability to understand
/ use for that."
"Our students, being majority
minority, would have no interest in Shakespeare … dead, white males … Ancient
Greece … the rigor of a formal research paper … Standard English … The master's
tools will never dismantle the master's house."
She knew they were lying. She knew
students came to this country, to this college, wanting to master the riches of
civilization. She encountered the students' yearning in their efforts at
hypercorrect speech patterns, in their awed mention of cousins who had gone to
more prestigious schools, in their references to their parents' dreams for them,
in their grasping at any excuse to drop a famous name into a conversation.
"As Socrates said … " they'd begin. They wanted someone to know that
they had heard that name. "Socrates." And they wanted to be guided to
being able to drop that name with more skill. "Did I get that right? Will
you talk to me as if I am one of you? Can I be part of this now?" their
eyes begged, after they dropped famous names.
Powerful professors were deciding that
minority students, poor students, students from the inner city, had no place in
the most advanced traditions of Western Civilization.
"I use rap lyrics in class … I have
them research questions on their phones in class … whoever gets the first answer
gets a prize … sonnets are a white form and minority students don't respond
well to them … they don't like rigid writing rubrics. I show them something
like the George Floyd video and have them write about their feelings. Very
successful."
Four gray-green cinder block walls. She
had worked on those walls with the diligence of a medieval mason. She had
practically earned a
signet ring with a square and compass insignia. Inside these four walls, a
student who may or may not be dead from cancer in a few years researched a
final paper topic that had nothing to do with cancer. She got to lose herself
in the search for truth. A resentful young white man became best friends with
someone whose parents were born in Nigeria. A conspiracy theorist switched from
"doing your own research," meaning, in his mind, finding websites
that fed his private fears and rages, and dipped into peer-reviewed articles,
and decided that he was wrong about something: "Maybe vampires don't exist!"
And then there was Sancta. When Prof. K
walked into the class the very first day, her eyes met with Sancta's, and Prof.
K knew she would either win Sancta over, or she would be defeated by Sancta. Prof.
K was not to be defeated.
Sancta was big and hard. She was from a
violent and notorious ghetto. When she told other students where she was from,
they waved their hands as if they'd touched something hot. The good, white
student sat as far away from Sancta as he could get. He just didn't want any of
that drama, and he knew drama was inevitable.
Sancta was rude, obscene, disruptive. One
day, Sancta tried to convince the class that "The Jews" had carried
out 9-11. Sancta was genuinely innocent when she insisted on this. Sancta had
no idea why it was outrageous or even controversial to pin 9-11 on "The
Jews." In Sancta's tiny universe, that "The Jews" had carried
out 9-11 was knowledge, not hateful conspiracy. Sancta had almost certainly
never had any close contact with Jews in her life. And she had already learned,
not just to hate Jews, but to regard them as non-human, as diabolical. Sancta
worked in a neighborhood where young black men regularly were seen in
surveillance videos beating up on Jews.
Prof. K said, "This is really
interesting, Sancta, because I am Jewish, and I disagree with you." Prof.
K wasn't Jewish, and she would, before the semester was over, reveal the ruse
she was using. She wanted Sancta, simply, to think, and letting Sancta know
that Jews are real people, people she might meet in real life, shook Sancta up
enough that she began to think and behave differently.
Do I punish this student in front of the
rest of the class, as an object lesson? Do I ignore her? Do I try to befriend
her? There were so many different methods. You tried one, you moved on to
another, you tried to stitch together enough minutes devoted to learning, not
to trying to get Sancta to focus. One day Prof. K tried pizza. She brought a
couple of fresh, hot pizzas into class and distributed the slices. That seemed
to win some over. But what ultimately worked with Sancta seemed to be what
Prof. K had been trying all semester. Truth. Thinking. Being introduced to
one's own mind, one's own questions, one's own path of discovery through the
routes laid down by scholars long past.
Sancta wanted to know something. Prof. K
helped Sancta to find the right peer-reviewed articles, to ask the right
questions, to fashion the right thesis statement, to devise a research design,
to carry that research out. Sancta and Prof. K worked on the project after
class in a shared adjunct office. Sancta would stick around the office longer
and longer, even after her work was done. One day, Prof. K realized, "My
God; this girl loves me." And Prof. K felt very embarrassed. She had no
idea what to do with love. She'd been working too hard on building a castle
keep, within which scholarship could take place.
But it didn't matter that Prof. K didn't
know what to do with Sancta's love, because, as happens every semester, the
semester was now over. And Prof. K would never see any of these young people
again.
"So, today's the last day," Prof.
K said to the class. The students looked, as they always looked, bored. Prof. K
soldiered on. She'd been teaching long enough to know that "Students look
bored" didn't always mean that students were bored.
"Remember when you were writing
your final papers, and I gave you such a hard time about placing the period
outside the parenthetical citation, rather than inside? And you became so
angry, and said, that's such a petty thing, what difference does it make?
"Well, here's what difference it
makes. After you leave this room, and this campus, you are going to want to
continue making your life better. You are going to apply for jobs. And the
person hiring you may not be smart enough or careful enough or have enough time
to discover what you have to offer. They will end up judging you on something petty,
like whether or not you know where to put a period after a parenthetical
citation, or some other task that proves that you know how to follow
instructions. As the saying goes, 'Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break
them like an artist.' Learn where that period goes and put it there. Then, once
you've taken care of that, expand your wings, and make your unique
contribution.
"Why did I work so hard to hammer
all that into you? Because the world is a tough place, and I want you to be
ready for it. I want you to conquer it. Not with rage or nihilism but with your
blossoming beauty. Every spring new flowers knock our eyes out, and make us
forget last year's flowers. Do that. Be that. Be the new blossoms.
"I hope that whatever else you've
learned in this class, you've learned enough about the search for truth, that
if some pompous person tries to belittle you or talk down to you or pull the
wool over your eyes with some statement you don't really understand, you can
deploy what you learned in this class. Throughout the rest of your life, people
are going to throw information at you, as if you were a soldier on a
battlefield bombarded with information.
"'Buy this! Sign up for this!
Worship this! Join this!'
"Pitchmen of various types will
toss big words at you, packaged in incomprehensible sound bites: 'Remember what
the Nazis did! So sign this petition!' Or, 'We can't take that route! Remember
what happened to the Albigensians!'
"Now you know how to handle that.
If someone tells you to remember what happened to the Albigensians, or mentions
some other word you're not familiar with, you can research it. You don't have
to stumble alone in the dark. You won't be intimidated. You'll be able to keep
your head and your self-confidence in spite of any confusion you might feel.
You'll know how to find out exactly who the Albigensians were, and why this
person brought them up. Use your tools for finding truth, and come back at that
person with all you've got, all you learned in this class. Goodbye now, and
have a great life."
That was it. Prof. K said her goodbye.
The students would leave the class, and, alone in the room, she could shed a
few tears before beginning her own way home, and the preparations for next
semester.
But something was wrong. The students
were not leaving. The class period was over. They had to leave. Go to other
classes, go to their jobs, go get their kids. But they just sat there. Prof. K
had no idea what was going on, or how to react.
Sancta raised her hand. Prof. K wanted
to say, "Sancta, it's the last day. You don't have to raise your hand any
more." But Prof. K said, "Yes, Sancta?"
"You have to tell us," Sancta
said.
"Yeah, you have to tell us,"
the young white man said.
"You can't let it go at that,"
said a student in the back who had barely spoken all semester.
"What?"
"About the Albigensians."
"Who were they? You have to
explain. Tell us the story. What happened," they had to know before they
could leave, "to the Albigensians?"
Prof. K wanted to die and go to Heaven
right then. But she did not. She gave a brief talk on the Albigensians, on the
last day of class, a beautiful spring day.
Our students can't do that.
Yes, they can.
Our students don't need that.
Yes, they do.
Our students won't benefit from that.
Yes, they will.
These events occurred almost ten years
ago. The barriers to conveying Western Civilization and scholarly methods to
students are higher today than they were even then.
Prof. K, a humanities and social sciences
person, knows one thing about physics. Pendulums swing. She hopes that when the
wild swing of recent years reaches some equilibrium, it will be in a place
where students are taught about truth, about scholarship, and about a history
that, no matter their skin color or economic background, rightfully belongs to
them.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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