Teachers vs. Students Part II

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 is—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, am 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 at the lunch table, sitting 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 their understanding of writing papers for the class. On my end, I had become frustrated with what I perceived to be apathy on the kids’ part to put effort into their writing. 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 placed on their papers. One student said that I had written 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, seemed to be 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 me (in my hope to connect with my students, I 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 I posed to my neighbor 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? It’s a fruitless task because the early damage is rarely 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 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, were 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, and 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 in her senior year and we had another fight that year, though no epitaphs were uttered during class.

I don’t think the adversarial relationships I’ve had with students are uncommon or out of the ordinary. 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 in the hallway 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.