I am (not) a pretentious boob

The other day in class, I was sitting in the back as the students were muddling through an open mic session, reading their pieces, commenting on others’ and sitting very still, hoping I wouldn’t notice the fact that they were not taking a risk and getting up in front of the class to read a poem or essay they wrote in the hope it was good enough for others to hear. On this day, as the class period was winding down and those slouching, hoping-to-be-invisible students were feeling better by telling themselves there wasn’t enough time to read, a student strode to the front and prefaced her piece with, “no offense, Trovato.” I figured she had improvised a story with me as a character and an absurd plot making me out to be either the villain or the foolish hero. Instead she read a rant. About me.

I remember myself as a sophomore struggling through a geometry class when something like this happened. My teacher was a short, red-haired, green-eyed leprechaun of a man. Even his voice was a bit high pitched. He thought himself a comedian and spent much of the class time gently poking students with his wit. I remember one day he took out a baseball and tossed it to each student as a signal for them to answer his query. It was a unique move to me at the time and I thought it was clever, and since I liked baseball, I enjoyed that day, even though I was a disaster at geometry. And I wasn’t the only one. Lots of students were struggling in the class. One day I remember we were reviewing for a test later in the week and a student asked the teacher a question which the teacher didn’t answer but made a joke instead. I don’t remember if the joke was on the student or about the material, but I would guess it was about the student not knowing the answer, because after the joke, the student gathered his books, got up from his desk and walked towards the door.

Talk about cognitive dissonance! I watched in complete disbelief, not sure of how to make sense of what was happening. And to add to my shock, as the student walked out of the room in the middle of class, he said to the teacher, “you’re a real jerk, you know that?” I was awed, and I’m pretty confident the whole class was. None of us were ready to believe that a student could talk like that to a teacher, let alone walk out and not be sent to the dean. I have to believe that even the teacher was shocked and as I watched his face when the boy told him that, I could see a brief moment of pain, as if he didn’t mean to hurt the boy and felt bad that he did. My sophomore self was in silent surprise not knowing how to respond or what to think, but I did feel bad for the student, and bad for the teacher, who I didn’t think meant to offend him. But I was also introduced to righteous anger—he had every right to be angry, and though he didn’t have to walk out or call the teacher a jerk, there was a justification to those things and I felt a respect for his courage in doing both.

As a teacher myself now, I’ve had my share of dealing with angry students. There are those that have had a bad time throughout their school career and just don’t buy in to the game of school. These types are difficult to deal with because it’s almost impossible to get them see there’s value in schooling and there is no way to change their behavior unless they see there’s a point to school. The one way I’ve been partially successful with these students is to get them to buy into me as a person, and then into the class. But that can be a long process and it’s not always successful and rarely lasting. The other type of angry student I’ve encountered is the one that does buy into the idea of education and schooling but not into my idea of it. In the past 10 years, I’ve been called an asshole, a bitch, I’ve been told students learn more when I don’t talk, I’ve been told that my class sucked, that it was too easy, too hard, too boring, too laid back, too planned out. Over the years, I’ve learned to take these criticisms in stride; I’ve learned not to take too personally what students say about me or my class, because the relationship between teacher and student is naturally adversarial. I mean teachers are judgers, and while we purport to only evaluate what the student produces and not the student, the student, caught in the grips of adolescence ,feels judged and will inevitably strike back (though I don’t believe this response is purely adolescent—but I won’t deal with this idea here). And most often they strike the soft spot. It’s amazing just how perceptive teenagers can be. For as much as they seem so wrapped up in their own insecurities that they notice nothing about the world around them, they are pros at sniffing out the insecurities of others and attacking them with pinpoint accuracy. And no one is spared, not even teachers.

On that Friday in creative writing, my student’s rant ended with the words, “you’re a pretentious boob,” cutting to the heart of what I try not to be in talking about literature or poetry or film. What gets me is how perceptive she was—I never told them I didn’t want to sound pretentious or would try to be down to earth, hip, cool. But clearly she understood my intention without me ever having to state it. Am I that transparent? That easy to read? I think what bothers me isn’t so much that she called me pretentious, or a boob, which I can’t help but giggle at—all I can think of is a giant breast with legs and arms clumsily bumping into walls and lamp posts—but that she could see through me so easily, that she could see what I don’t want to project about myself. I guess I’m always afraid that I am pretentious, a literary nerd who finds joy in esoteric words and argues with like-minded boobs about etymologies and the proper uses of semicolons and apostrophes. One day, sitting in the teachers’ lunchroom with gym and special education teachers, one of our group related a story about a family summer house in Niles Michigan. I got excited and blurted out, “Niles Michigan? Ring Lardner was from there.” A colleague of mine in the English department, sitting next to me, merely shook his head and gave me a rueful smile as if to say, why would you think these guys would know who that is? Don’t be such a pretentious boob. He didn’t say that, but it lurked in his smile and the shake of his head, and I knew it.

Looking back over my career as a teacher, I suppose I’ve had to fight my own pretention along the way. Years ago, in a film study class for juniors and seniors, I asked the class to explain why they were having such difficulty writing papers for the class. On my end, I had become frustrated with what I perceived to be apathy on the kids’ part to make their papers more interesting—it’s film after all. I felt their writing lacked the detail and panache that students in the past had attempted. During the conversation students shared their frustrations with the comments I had written on their papers. One student said I had written a comment to the effect that because of his failure to capture my attention, the whole class would suffer bad grades. Listening to them I began to see the vicious cycle that I was perpetuating—the more harsh the comment, the less inclined they felt to try. As the conversation persisted, one student sitting in the back corner of the room kept to herself the whole time, seemingly oblivious to the conversation we were having, until another student asked if she thought I was a tough grader. The girl looked up from what she was doing, and without a pause blurted out, “oh yeah, you a bitch.” At that moment, I turned to the student sitting next to me (in my hope to connect with my students, I had arranged us in a circle to portray the false message of equality—then again, maybe it wasn’t so false if a student felt equal enough to call me a bitch) and asked, “did she just call me a bitch?” I suppose I should have been angered by that, I should have not allowed a subordinate to speak to me in such a disrespectful way. But I wasn’t upset, I mean I had blamed the failure of the class on one student for putting me in such a bad mood after reading his paper. I was a bitch. In order to defend herself for making that comment, she responded to the question with, “at least I didn’t call you a punk bitch.” The class murmured its agreement—that would have been bad; bitch was a mild insult comparatively, nothing to feel attacked about. I congratulated her on her restraint, and the class and I agreed that I would not assume their inability to write a decent paper was because of apathy, that my job would be to help them write better instead of hammering them with angry comments.

Of course not all exchanges result in such peaceable terms; more often they are tinged with hurt and lashing out from both sides. During one prolonged battle between me and a student, I attempted to unravel the mystery back to its origin: exactly who had first damaged the other? But it’s a fruitless task because the early damage is not always intentional or felt by the giver. And the receiver often attempts to suppress the hurt, though they return it and the volley begins until, by the time the explosion happens, who can remember who served first? The points build up on both sides.

The explosion in this case happened in the spring, and the student asked for an extension or maybe forgiveness for a missed assignment, again, the details escape me. I did not give in, and as the student returned to her seat, she mumbled not so quietly, “asshole!” Learning from the bitch comment earlier in the year, or the year before, I turned to the other side of the room and asked the same question. This class, being freshmen, was a little more uneasy. Like my experience in sophomore geometry, many of them were wobbling in cognitive dissonance—did she really just call the teacher an asshole?—and didn’t really respond. Knowing I couldn’t just let this go, mainly because the girl was upset and also because the class might lose respect if I didn’t do something, I invited her into the hallway and spent the next 5 minutes arguing with her (the conversation felt like ones I’ve had with my sister, I couldn’t help but show my frustration as opposed to keeping a professorial coolness); I yelled at her for letting her resentment build up instead of talking to me earlier, and she yelled at me for being unfair and not listening to her. We ended that conversation on speaking terms, but we didn’t grow closer. In fact, that same student ended up in my AP English course as a senior and we had another fight that year, though she uttered no other epithets during class.

I don’t think the adversarial relationships I’ve had with students are uncommon or strange. Spending every day together and having to face each other on good days and on bad days lends the classroom a more familial shade than most of us would like to admit. And the feeling I had of arguing with my sister when arguing with the student was not the last time I felt that. I see my family members in lots of my students and I have come to accept that they see me for who I am even when I don’t want them to. Like a teenager, I can be moody and irritable and silly and lazy and trying to hide that from them is often useless, because they sense who I am and respond to me.