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From the issue dated October 18, 2002
40 Years Before the Class
By PAUL STRONG
It seemed like a good idea at the time: My students would
each write a two-page description of a classmate, then read
their papers aloud. Each was to provide a sealed envelope
containing the name of the person he or she was writing about
-- our version of the Academy Awards -- so we could see if the
descriptions were concrete and detailed enough for us to guess
the right person. It didn't turn out the way I'd expected.
Nearly all the men wrote about the same woman, a perfectly
nice, rather reserved C+ student whom I had hardly noticed but
who, it turned out, was incredibly attractive to 18-year-old
males. I had thought it odd that some students always got to
class early, but I'd assumed they liked the course and were
happy to be there. What they liked, I learned from their
remarkably descriptive papers, was that siren, and the early
rush was to get a seat close enough for a chat with her before
class -- or, if that was not possible, for what one called "a
seat with a view." Ryan, after five paragraphs of vivid,
precise detail -- just what I'd hoped for -- concluded with a
line that really got my attention: "Out there, somewhere, Dr.
Strong is teaching away."
"You writing to me?" I thought. "You writing to me? I'm the
only one here grading your paper."
Truth be told, I was quite taken with Ryan's sentence. I'd
encouraged the students to come up with strong endings, so
their papers didn't just stop, as though the writer had run
out of gas at 3 in the morning. In fact, I liked it enough to
copy it onto an index card and tack it to the corkboard next
to my desk -- something to ponder as I have my morning coffee.
I think of it as an academic memento mori, a reminder, as if I
needed one, of the distance that can exist between a
60-year-old teacher, whose job is to explain squinting
modifiers and irregular plural possessives, and my Gap-clad
charges, who probably think of me, to the extent I'm on their
radar at all, as squinting and irregular myself.
And what's the view from the front of the room, as I peer over
my half glasses? For starters, a sea of faces whose names I
can't seem to remember. Once, students' names were locked in
my memory's vault by the end of our first class; now I'm lucky
if I can distinguish among the Ashleys by semester's end. I
make a little seating chart on the outside of a manila folder
that I bring to class. The chart shows where my students
usually sit. I glance at it surreptitiously and try to trick
myself into believing that my students don't see what I'm
doing, but their eyesight is just fine. In any case, at
semester's end they quickly disappear (the names, not the
students).
Worse than forgetting is calling a student by the name of
someone from the distant past. Thank God for the wild-eyed
ones I had in the '60s -- I'm not likely to confuse any of my
current crop with Tuna Fish or Bavo. Sometimes, early in the
semester, I feel a warmth or antipathy toward a freshman I
barely know. Only recently did I realize it's because he or
she reminds me of someone I taught years ago. Everything was
new then. I was preparing every poem, every novel, every
course for the first time. It was exciting to be a TA in
graduate school, half-student but also half-teacher. I'm
handing out blue books! I have an office (that I share with
seven others, but still)! I'm at a meeting!
That excitement is long gone, and meetings have lost their
charm.
The fact is, there's a good bit of anger among some of my
colleagues who are approaching retirement. They feel distant
from students who don't read, who play music they dislike, who
have tattoos and piercings, who wear hats to class -- the list
is endless. They are annoyed by the very assistant professors
they hired, who suddenly seem all too eager to kidnap their
students, steal their courses, chair their departments, plan
their retirement parties. They are angry at newly hired deans,
provosts, and presidents, would-be generals who haven't been
through the wars (at least, not on our campus), who insist on
reinventing the wheel, and, worse yet, who don't have a proper
appreciation for their many contributions to the university.
I don't know if such anger is unique to academe or common at
the end of any career, but it seems a sad way to close things
out.
From time to time I feel it too, but mostly I don't, nor do I
want to -- that kind of anger is like poison. Besides,
teaching allows so many chances for renewal. There are still
new poems and novels to teach (last spring, my students and I
fell in love with Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl
Earring). Each fall, along with students who are old friends,
there are new faces, different hats. If fall classes aren't
wonderful, the world begins anew in January.
And I've learned some things about the classroom since I
began. Instead of "teaching away," I've found ways to let the
class come to me. I no longer fear the occasional silence, nor
do I feel the need to hit every grace note and tell my class
every single thing I know about the subject at hand. As the
short-story writer Andre Dubus put it in a 1997 essay in The
Kenyon Review, "Through my years of teaching I learned to walk
into a classroom wondering what I would say, rather than
knowing what I would say."
Ryan is gone, but I read his words most mornings. On days when
the 40-year gap between aging professor and the teenagers I'm
supposed to teach seems particularly wide, I remind myself
that, under my tutelage, Ryan wrote a memorable essay. That
was the idea, after all. Sly puss, he must have been secretly
learning all the while.
Paul Strong is a professor of English and the director of the
honors program at Alfred University.
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Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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