Back in the day, I played a mean game of golf, good enough to win tournaments and club championships and attract local attention. I worked at it, spending countless hours on the practice range, often under the tutelage of the club’s professional. I even worked at the golf course, in the pro shop, and on the golf course, with the maintenance crew. To a large extent, being a proficient golfer comprised my identity, for others as well as for me.
While I was in graduate school, I did not have the time or opportunity to play. For six years I did not touch a golf club. When I was finally able to take up the game again, I found that I had lost it. Flaws had crept into my swing, and, despite incessant analysis, I was unable to recapture my former level of play. In a pattern that unspooled over many years, I’d think I’d discovered the problem, make the change, but found improvement elusive. I devoured books and magazines featuring golf instruction, took lessons, prowled golf websites to watch videos of professionals’ swings—all to no avail. I would have had better luck clicking my heels three times and wishing I were back in the Kansas of competent play.
The strange thing is that, despite my unsullied record of failure to diagnose and correct my swing, every time I stepped on to the first tee I felt I was on the cusp of rejuvenation. I’d think, “This is the day when it will all come together. Today, what was then will become what is now. This is the day my golf game will be reborn.” By the third hole, however, I had mentally checked out, consoling myself with the thought that at least I was getting some good exercise—or, in my more desperate moments, with the slogan I had once seen on the scorecard of a Baptist-owned course: “A closer walk with God,” although, in truth, it felt more like a loitering in Gethsemane. Actually, Mark Twain was more accurate: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Still, the next time I played, I stood on the first tee, fully Galahaded, fully expecting on this foray to find the miraculous grail of my glory days.
And strange to say, miracles, at least of the micro variety, do happen. Three springs ago, while on the practice range, I discovered the problem that had plagued and beleaguered me. What I had lost, I found. Instantaneously, I began striking the ball more solidly, dead solid perfect off the sweet spot, launching it straighter and farther and at a higher trajectory than I had in many years. And on that day, the day when my long-expected renaissance had finally arrived, I drove home, put my golf clubs in a basement corner, covered them with a small tarp, and quit playing.
* * *
I have aspirations for myself. I like the pragmatist notion that meaning is use, body and thought in action. I do not seek to be a bystander to my life, irrelevant to myself. I make plans for the future. They carpenter our lives into an ordered unfolding; they hold an arm outstretched, palm upward, to resist the havocking churn and plunge, the mad ricochet, of events. I expect skills once acquired, to stay acquired, over the course of time, at least until they decline, as they necessarily must, with age. Until then, I go on going on.
That day on the practice range, I reclaimed the ability I had lost. It was enough. And so, I left playing golf behind.
* * *
I am excited at the beginning of every semester. I am sure that the work I have done to prepare my classes has refined them to the point of can’t-fail success. Having read up on best practices and the latest pedagogical research into student learning; having created new in-class activities sequenced and scaffolded to impart the skills necessary for student success on papers and tests; feeling certain that this cohort of students will display curiosity, will write clearly and comprehensively in prose polished by editing and proofreading, will be willing to read not just with texts but against and beneath them, will gladly entertain ideas that broaden their horizons rather than genuflect before those that validate and reinforce their preconceptions, will be open to making canyon-wide intellectual leaps that even Evil Knievel would envy, I approach each new class with radiant expectation. “This is the semester it will all come together,” I think; “this is the semester when students will embrace intellectual culture and experience a renaissance of wonder.”
And three weeks in, that radiant expectation has not just been dimmed; it has been dealt an eyeball kick and forehead blow. 4-G attention spanned, smartphone-armed, discipled by the new dispensation testaments of Twitter and Facebook, students will not go gentle into the educational experience I have prepared for them. I realize that the majority of my students might touch an idea, but will not fondle it; that they are good at accessing and disseminating information, but cannot quite massage it into knowledge; that they will resist introspection and refrain from the difficult work of analyzing for assumptions, forecasting implications, and engaging in evaluating and synthesizing ideas. I realize that this semester, like past semesters, will be as frustrating as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.
I can feel myself hunkering and find my eyes scanning the surroundings for sandbags to pile up around me. Yet, I think, “OK, I’ll need to rework the architecture of the course once the semester ends.”
* * *
Perhaps I’m ensnared in a Nietzschean eternal recurrence: “the hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again,” he says, and evidently me with it. But I don’t think I love my fate that much, to the point of seeing all my planning haywired and hackysacked. Perhaps I need to renounce my affiliation with Emerson’s “party of hope.” Perhaps I suffer from optimism bias, projecting rosy faith into the future where it solidifies into expectation. Perhaps I pursue a fool’s folly, victimized by self-delusion, an apologist for an unrealistic thithered elsewhere. But whatever it is, it is necessary. Absolutely necessary.
I have aspirations for these young persons, aspirations that may involve me, certainly my children and grandchildren. I want them to know how to coax meaning from information. I want them to be minds in thrumming motion, celebrants of kinetic thought, acolytes of continual learning. I want them to realize that the world is not for loitering in but acting upon; that it is made, not given, and, thus, can be remade. And so, I remake my courses. I simply must believe, must expect, that this time, this time, it will indeed and in fact all come together.
And when it does, when it does, I will leave teaching behind.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Student Lives
Reading student essays this semester, I was reminded of something I have always known but too often forget: students are not biographically invisible. They are not simply, only, generically, students.
One of my students, a young man from Puerto Rico, described studying, during his freshman year in high school, with his best friend, the only son of a man everyone knew but no one openly acknowledged as a powerful drug lord. Another young man, born in a metropolitan inner city, was abandoned as a child by his mother and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which devalued what the word “home” connotes. Only an unbanishable drive to learn and a talent for football got him to a desk in my Freshman Composition class. A third young man, mugged at gunpoint, still carries the trauma with him, embodied, visceral, inextinguishable, resistant to every therapeutic gesture. His desk is often empty. A female student’s back-home boyfriend was growing increasingly distant; another lost her mother to a brain tumor; still another confessed her addition to Facebook and worried that the medium of the computer screen would displace her desire, or ability, to fully inhabit real-life social relationships; still another, with ADHD, was contemplating discontinuing his medication.
Other students narrate happier stories: loving parents who sacrificed for their well-being; thick networks of caring friends; sports successes and sports failures that catalyzed personal growth; travel to other regions of the country or to other countries, from which they returned chastened by what they had so casually considered themselves entitled to; video game rivalries; books that absorbed them, transported them so completely into a clock-frozen now that they forgot they held the book in their hands; religious belief that guided and inspired, or wavered and was abandoned; sudden moments of transcendence, of insight, of understanding—unmediated moments fully recognized as suffused with meaning.
Students have lives, lives that extend far beyond the classroom we occupy and its cabined agenda of thesis and support, of fluid expression and patterns of organization, of spelling and comma splices, of standard usage and the MLA documentation system. Students have experiences, intense and textured, that echo in the world if I am attentive enough to listen rather than hear. In their writing they struggle to give their lives language, to learn how to make events signify, to make the world intelligible, to enflesh it, give it a pulse, make in breathe in synchronicity with their need to understand it, grasp it, make it reveal itself. “Listen,” I must continually remind myself; “pay attention.” I must remember that I know that they have lives and purposes and intentions with values firmly sutured to them, remember that my classroom world, so engrossing to me, so self-enclosed and self-evidently significant, so islanded in its disciplinary structure, is not their world, nor the much wider world of choice and contingency and contradiction they stand poised to enter.
Such remembering makes teachers both the students’ ally and the bearers of their discipline’s standards. Teachers do well, in other words, when they both affirm and challenge. The two are really the same gesture. We affirm and challenge when we recall that, etymologically, the word “educate” means to lead forth and bend our effort toward eliciting from students that which it is in them to be, drawing them out into the articulation of what had been inchoate, into the recognition of what had been shadowed and barely glimpsed. We affirm and challenge when we create learning environments where ideas can be inhabited rather than paid a cursory visit, where thoughts await deliberative judgment, where analyzing supplants merely witnessing, where students chronicle rather than observe only. We affirm and challenge when we dare students to know, double dare if necessary, when our expectation and assessment is based what constitutes excellence in a particular endeavor. We affirm and challenge when we recall that the simple words “you can do it” are the empowering grace of intellectual courage and perseverance. We affirm and challenge when we enable them to see that the world is made, not given, and because it is made it can be remade, that its conditions, as John Dewey says, can be adjusted, rather than their having to adjust themselves to fit those conditions.
Students have lives, lives they may wish to forsake completely or embrace fully, lives that are anguished or contented, lives that are stammers of doubt or shouts of confidence. They do not, should not, speak the grammar of our lives. Theirs has its own syntax, and we do well when, and only when, as Walt Whitman says, we “teach straying” from us so they can find the richness of its expression.
One of my students, a young man from Puerto Rico, described studying, during his freshman year in high school, with his best friend, the only son of a man everyone knew but no one openly acknowledged as a powerful drug lord. Another young man, born in a metropolitan inner city, was abandoned as a child by his mother and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which devalued what the word “home” connotes. Only an unbanishable drive to learn and a talent for football got him to a desk in my Freshman Composition class. A third young man, mugged at gunpoint, still carries the trauma with him, embodied, visceral, inextinguishable, resistant to every therapeutic gesture. His desk is often empty. A female student’s back-home boyfriend was growing increasingly distant; another lost her mother to a brain tumor; still another confessed her addition to Facebook and worried that the medium of the computer screen would displace her desire, or ability, to fully inhabit real-life social relationships; still another, with ADHD, was contemplating discontinuing his medication.
Other students narrate happier stories: loving parents who sacrificed for their well-being; thick networks of caring friends; sports successes and sports failures that catalyzed personal growth; travel to other regions of the country or to other countries, from which they returned chastened by what they had so casually considered themselves entitled to; video game rivalries; books that absorbed them, transported them so completely into a clock-frozen now that they forgot they held the book in their hands; religious belief that guided and inspired, or wavered and was abandoned; sudden moments of transcendence, of insight, of understanding—unmediated moments fully recognized as suffused with meaning.
Students have lives, lives that extend far beyond the classroom we occupy and its cabined agenda of thesis and support, of fluid expression and patterns of organization, of spelling and comma splices, of standard usage and the MLA documentation system. Students have experiences, intense and textured, that echo in the world if I am attentive enough to listen rather than hear. In their writing they struggle to give their lives language, to learn how to make events signify, to make the world intelligible, to enflesh it, give it a pulse, make in breathe in synchronicity with their need to understand it, grasp it, make it reveal itself. “Listen,” I must continually remind myself; “pay attention.” I must remember that I know that they have lives and purposes and intentions with values firmly sutured to them, remember that my classroom world, so engrossing to me, so self-enclosed and self-evidently significant, so islanded in its disciplinary structure, is not their world, nor the much wider world of choice and contingency and contradiction they stand poised to enter.
Such remembering makes teachers both the students’ ally and the bearers of their discipline’s standards. Teachers do well, in other words, when they both affirm and challenge. The two are really the same gesture. We affirm and challenge when we recall that, etymologically, the word “educate” means to lead forth and bend our effort toward eliciting from students that which it is in them to be, drawing them out into the articulation of what had been inchoate, into the recognition of what had been shadowed and barely glimpsed. We affirm and challenge when we create learning environments where ideas can be inhabited rather than paid a cursory visit, where thoughts await deliberative judgment, where analyzing supplants merely witnessing, where students chronicle rather than observe only. We affirm and challenge when we dare students to know, double dare if necessary, when our expectation and assessment is based what constitutes excellence in a particular endeavor. We affirm and challenge when we recall that the simple words “you can do it” are the empowering grace of intellectual courage and perseverance. We affirm and challenge when we enable them to see that the world is made, not given, and because it is made it can be remade, that its conditions, as John Dewey says, can be adjusted, rather than their having to adjust themselves to fit those conditions.
Students have lives, lives they may wish to forsake completely or embrace fully, lives that are anguished or contented, lives that are stammers of doubt or shouts of confidence. They do not, should not, speak the grammar of our lives. Theirs has its own syntax, and we do well when, and only when, as Walt Whitman says, we “teach straying” from us so they can find the richness of its expression.
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