My dear, darling, brilliant, wonderful students,
Here we are on Day 2 of Spring Break, and I'm already thinking of you again. I successfully kept myself from working yesterday by watching MI-5 on Netflix and
It's been good so far between us, yes? I think yes. And yet...and yet...I must confess, I'm bothered by a few trends. Shall we discuss?
1) To the student who says: "Oh, we were supposed to read that? Oh, yeah, I didn't read it."
Hypothetically, what would happen if you turned in a paper, and I said "Oh, I was supposed to grade that? Oh, yeah, I didn't grade that."
2) To the student who says: "But it's soooo loooonng!"
Believe me, the ten pages of Pulitzer Prize winning, classic, captivating fiction you have the opportunity to read as a member of a first world country where you have the chance to come to an air conditioned room and sit for 75 minutes while people discuss literature and the arts rather than having to forge in the desert for food and water while rebel armies are shooting at you is not a chore. It's a gift. Read it and say thank you.
3) To the student who says: "This is booorring."
It's a scientific fact that people who say this are, indeed, themselves, boring. Boredom is a sign of a lack of imagination. Aren't you just announcing your own mental laziness to the rest of the class? When I hear someone say "this is boring,' (even if that someone is my own child, sprung from my own cells) I think "oh, here's someone who is caught in the throes of utter mediocrity. I will now stop listening to this person, because he/she has absolutely nothing interesting or worthwhile to contribute to this discussion."
4) To the student who says: "........" [crickets]
I know you well enough now to know at least three brilliant thoughts circle around in your brain while you sit there on the third row, not saying a word. Everything you write is astute, clever, and interesting. When you talk to me separately, you are funny and you are always right about your ideas. Please, for the love of all that is academic, TALK.
5) To the student who snores:
I don't lecture in your bedroom. Don't sleep in my classroom.
6) To the student who shows up so stoned that the rest of us crave Doritos:
Dude, I don't know whether to be flattered that even though you clearly have other priorities, you still show up for my class; or, insulted because you think this is so easy that you can show up half-baked and still manage to pass. Actually, who am I kidding. We both know you aren't going to pass.
And, 7) To the students who read, show up sober, and talk:
You guys are awesome. I've loved meeting you, and I look forward to another eight weeks.
FUNNY!!
ReplyDeleteRead it and say thank you? No thank you. Nice use of pathos, Professor, but I respectfully disagree. Instead of reading "Araby" and contemplating the father/son relationship of fictional characters I'd much rather be in the group on the next flight out to volunteer to bring food and water to the people of Africa. I'd allow you to keep your air conditioning if I could have grown up to know how to farm, I'd sooner farm and grow my own food, learn how to be independent of a corporatist world that sends me to school with no promise of a job, let alone a happy future, then to learn and memorize the correct MLA format. Now I don't want you to think that I don't enjoy your class, I do, and I try very hard in it. I'm two stories short of having read all of the ones assigned up to this point.. I think. It's hard to keep up. Four classes and writing for the newspaper, especially when it all seems so trivial. I never asked to be born in a first world country and I'd rather use my privilege to help others then to read literature, Pulitzer prize winning or other wise. To help the starving and thirsty and homeless and sick here and abroad seems much more appropriate.
ReplyDeleteIf I am boring, mundane or mediocre, then that is fine with me, I don't know if I find these stories boring, or if I just detest the ways that they end. Am I suppose to mourn Willy or Troy? Am I supposed to chastise Biff and congratulate Cory? Am I to feel bad for the kid in Araby or agree that the guy in "The Boarding House" should marry Polly? I don't and I won't. I think it melodramatic that the mother in "All That Rises Must Converge" had a stroke caused by the stress of getting hit by a black woman. You shouldn't assume your politeness is considered polite by other people.
It reminds me off all the fake politeness of the south, it makes me sick to my stomach, I'd rather people admit that they detest everything or anything about me then to come to me with fake politeness. Don't offer me something if you don't really want me to have it, don't act nice to me if you don't like me, especially if you're going to talk about me behind my back. Just saying.
And since it's improper to say, "In Conclusion" I'll just say this, I love your class, and you are one of my favorite professors, but I felt that all of the above had to be said.
Thanks,
Me
Two things:
Delete1) I did not insinuate a choice between sitting in an air conditioned room reading great fiction and performing some meaningful service in the world such as working to end poverty by hoeing roots in the African dust. I compared being a student to being the victim of unspeakable violence. In other words, yes, things could be better, but things could also be much, much worse. I think you would allow that the cause of many of the world’s ills come back, eventually, to a lack of empathy, knowledge, and comprehension; in other words, much of the great hurt we do to each other stems from a lack of education. Knowledge is power and all that. I cannot be in Africa turning up soil, but I can dig into the minds and hearts of the material I have here in Cartersville, Georgia—namely my students’ comfortable ways of thinking--to try to encourage these students to bear fruit, to care, to understand, to empathize, to go out in the world and make a difference.
2) I firmly believe, with every fiber of my being, to the very core of my soul, with unapologetic passion and conviction, that literature is the most powerful tool we have, as human beings, to come to a place of empathy and tolerance. I won’t call it a key; it’s more like a crowbar to me. It pries open the rusted door to all the secret tunnels we’ve forgot or willfully buried—the source of creative writing is the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” Yeats wrote. When I say “we,” I mean capital H Humanity. Literature forces us to take off our masks, to confront our facades, to hear our own stories, to witness our own brutality, to uncover our eyes to see the monsters we have created, and to inhabit the experiences of other souls who are exactly the opposite and exactly the same as ourselves. Literature does not lie flat to me. It does not live on the page. It lives in the choice, the drive, to leave the classroom and go hoe roots in the African dust. Why do you want to do that? Because you care. Why do you care? Because that pain hurts your heart. Why does it hurt? Because you have heard their stories. Stories. Story—what we wrote on the cave walls about the hunt and the stars and our worlds; what we told about fallen heroes while watching their funeral pyres float out into the icy North Atlantic; what we created to explain our very creation.
3) Julian’s mother buckles because the story she has created for herself is false, and with a real and symbolic stroke, she realizes that. When she confronts her own story—that she is a small-minded, racist, holier-than-thou bigot, she collapses. Julian’s response indicates that he will never be able to reconcile himself with his own racism and his own intolerance and cruelty for the way he has belittled his own mother. No one escapes Flannery’s sharp judgment. She calls out both of them, and then turns her eye to the reader. This is 1964, people, she says. What will you do with this? What will you do with the Civil Rights Movement, and how do you define grace and tolerance in the midst of such a tumultuous time? And to us, in 2012, how do we respond to the insidious, equally cruel, bigoted ideology that results in the sort of passive racism directly responsible for events such as Travon Martin’s death and subsequent demonization? Julian’s mother kills Travon Martin, and reading Flannery’s story forces us to be honest with ourselves in seeing that.
4) This is too much fun. Thank you so much for challenging me to keep digging. (Okay, that was four things. I know.)
I know that wasn't your insinuation, but still, the statement, "Read it and say thank you." Stings like soap on the tongue of my mind. It's very much the entire environment I've grown up in, if not the culture/society. All the professionals and experts say I get everything that I want, that my generation is spoiled, which I think is the biggest joke ever from my personal perspective. Spoiled on what? Parents that drink and smoke? Spoiled on divorce? Spoiled on single - parent households? Spoiled on a depression like economy? All the while I'm supposed to like my broken home life, be thankful for my white 'male' privilege, thankful that I get to slowly kill myself on the sodium infused, preserved crap that they pass for food in this country (at least until I get my own job and buy my own food).
DeleteWe're spoiled on an over saturation of material things, that leave us void of any kind of intellect, and I understand that your goal is to fill that void. But where my void is supposed to be, if I can concede that I do not have one, is a pain. A pain that I realize I need to detox off of all the things that I have, my cell phone, my computer. All of these technologies made off of the broken backs and sweat drops of people in less fortunate countries. All the while I cannot even get a job and my father is supposed to pay taxes while the wealthy sit on their money, stashed away in foreign banks?
I agree, this world lacks much empathy and comprehension. Just this month, Women's History Month, I lost a sister in Mexico because she's Transgender, which isn't comparable to African Genocide by any means, but is an issue that is a lot closer to my selfish, American heart.
It is fun. I enjoyed your second and third points, but was unsure what to say to them. I enjoy a great debate. When I read your opening I thought you were angry at me, but then I read part four and was like, "Phew."
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