20131211.0600

I have noted a few times in the past that I read articles on Cracked.com, working from them in my writing here and on the blog I abortively maintain in support of my teaching.  (Evidently, I can maintain one blog with any regularity in addition to my personal journals and my professional writing.)  Yesterday, I came across J.F. Sargent's "5 Important Milestones of Adulthood Nobody Talks About," and on the second page of that article there is a comment that stands out to me: "college ended, and I got a real job, and suddenly my responsibility wasn't to go to a room and half-listen to an incredibly smart person who was being paid to tolerate me explain some of the most complicated and nuanced ideas ever developed in human history."  Indeed, as I saw it, I did a double-take, and a slow smile that combat veterans have told me is more unnerving than being under fire (seriously--but I have mellowed out in my old age) spread across my face; even now I am giggling as I think on it.  For it bespeaks a truth of which far too few students are aware--particularly in weeks such as this which, as I have mentioned, wrap up terms of instruction.

Despite the protestations of many, most of my colleagues in the professoriate are damned intelligent people.  The way the system is set up, each of us who is at the front of the collegiate classroom has made a recorded contribution to human knowledge, bringing into the world some new thing that has not been known by anyone before--or is well on the way to doing so.  Even those of us who have been proven wrong in the years since can take satisfaction in the fact that the understanding we developed was necessary to arriving at the better one--and none of us are at The Truth, even though each of us edges the rest of us just a little bit closer to it.  And none of us to my knowledge relish being cooped up in a classroom for several hours a week with "young adults" who do not want to be there but are there because they perceive being there as necessary to getting a pretty piece of paper that will allow them to do what it is that they actually want to do.  (I think I am echoing myself again.)  Guiding bright and engaged minds to new insights and understandings (and, yes, seeing our own ideas taken up as standards of judgment and lenses through which to view the world--but who doesn't like knowing that their views matter?) is great, but most of the students in most of our classes are filling out course requirements, not looking into things that they want to know, and their lack of commitment to the work tells in their classroom performance.

(Many do realize later that they actually ought to have learned what their classes were teaching them, consciously or not.)

I like the job I have.  I view myself as a scholar, and I view as a major component of scholarship the dissemination of knowledge--not just through publication or presentation, but in the classroom.  But I have little love for students who do not take what they are doing seriously--and most of them, sadly, do not take seriously the work that is assigned them, as their performance on that work suggests.  I do much to prompt engagement with the materials I present--jokes, subject materials unusual and innovative, examples from popular media--yet many will not reach out and take hold of what I lay before them.  Why should I be expected to enjoy being shown that my efforts are of no avail?  The job for which I am paid means that I do what I can to offer the information.  The work to which I am called bids me reach out to and work with those who accept the offer.  The rest remain in my classes (and are complaining about their grades this week in addition to trying to find ways to improve those grades--only now at the end).  They have the right to the seats they occupy.  But I cannot say that I am giddy at the thought that those seats are occupied by those who would rather be somewhere else--except that the school "makes" them, and they, as any others, hate what they are "made" to do and those who most immediately "make" them do it.

Sargent is right, and I wish more people realized it.