Tag: Teaching

Teaching Behind the Lines

French resistance fighters putting up posters
French Resistance Fighters putting up posters.  Image from “History in Photos” Blog (available here)

It’s been a year now since the election, and here I am, still fighting off a sense of futility and hopelessness about the future. During that time, the United States has pulled out of the Paris Accord in an astounding demonstration of willful ignorance about climate change, suffered a spate of horrific mass murders due to lax gun laws, and threatened nuclear war with North Korea. Suffice it to say that things are not going well.

But I should point out that the emphasis in my first sentence should be on the word “fighting,” because that’s what I’m doing these days: in my own small way, I’m waging a tiny war on some of the ignorance and egotism that seems to be ruling my country these days. Somewhere (I can’t find it anymore, and perhaps that’s just as well), the French novelist Léon Werth said that any action taken against tyranny, no matter how small, no matter how personal, helps to make things better. I’ve taken his words to heart, and I’m using this space to take stock of what I’ve done in the last year. I do this not to brag–far from it, because I know I’ve done far too little–but to remind myself that although I feel powerless too much of the time, I am not quite as powerless as I seem.

Let me begin, however, by saying what I haven’t done. I have not run for office. I did that in 2012, perhaps having had an inkling that things were not going well in my part of the country, but I was crushed by an unresponsive political system, apathy, and my own supreme unsuitability for the task. I am not ready to run for office again. In fact, I may never be ready to run again. I did write about my experience, however, and over the past year, I have encouraged other people, specifically women, to run for office. I’ve talked to a few activist groups about my experiences, and perhaps most important of all, I’ve donated to campaigns.

The thing I’ve done that merits any kind of discussion, however, is what I would call “resistance teaching”: going behind the lines of smug, self-satisfied ignorance, and using any tools I have to fight it. I still believe, naive as I am, that education can fight tyranny, injustice, and inequality. So I have engaged in a few activities that will, I hope, result in creating discussions, examining benighted attitudes, and opening up minds. I haven’t done anything too flamboyant, mind you–just a few actions that will hopefully develop into something more tangible in the months to come.

Here is my list:

  1. In spite of feeling gloomy about the future, I’ve continued with my writing, because I felt that even in difficult times, people should concentrate on making art. I self-published my second novel, and I wrote about it here, explaining why self-publishing can be an act of resistance in and of itself.
  2. I began to translate a novel about WW I, written by Léon Werth. I am now nearing my second revision of the translation. I have submitted a chapter of it to several fine magazines and received some nice rejection letters. I will be using my translation to present a short paper on WW I writing and Hemingway at the International Hemingway Conference in Paris this summer.
  3. I’ve traveled–quite a bit. I went to Italy, to Wales, to France, to Dallas, to Boston, and some other places that I can’t remember now. Traveling is important to open up barriers, intellectual as well as political. For example, in France I learned that while we Americans thought of Emmanuel Macron as a kind of savior for the French, he was viewed with some real skepticism and even fear by his electorate. Sure, he was better than Marine LePen–but he was still an unknown quantity, and most French people I met expressed some degree of hesitation about endorsing him.
  4. I directed a play for my community theatre group. Although it was hard and very time-consuming, I discovered that I really believe in the value of community theatre, where a group of individuals come together in a selfless (for the most part) effort to bring the words and ideas of a person long dead back to life. So what if audiences are tiny? It’s the work that matters, not the reception of it.
  5. I gave a talk at the C.S. Lewis Festival, which you can read here. It was fun and stimulating, and I remembered just how much I enjoy thinking and exploring literature and the ideas that shape it.

All of these things are fine, but I think the most important thing I’ve done in the past year is going back into the classroom again, this time as a substitute to help out some friends, but also to engage in what I think of “resistance teaching.” As a substitute professor, as a lifelong learning instructor, I can engage students and encourage them to think without being bound by a syllabus or any other requirements. I can get behind the lines of bureaucratic structures and work to create an atmosphere of free discussion and intellectual exploration. It is small work, and it may not be very effective, but I have taken it on as my own work, my own idiosyncratic way of combating the heartless ignorance, the dangerous half-assed education that prevails in our society.

I have always loved the idea of Resistance Fighters. I just never thought I’d be one myself.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

As I sit at my desk, waiting for papers to trickle in, I take a few minutes to contemplate the teaching life. Don’t worry–this won’t be a political post decrying the impossible demands placed on teachers in the United States, the lack of professional respect for them, or the very real difficulties involved in creating a career in teaching, although all of those topics do bear talking about. Today, rather than craft a careful argument about the demise of education and its consequences for our culture, I’m just going to indulge in some personal reflections on the teaching life, offered by a community college professor who is still in the trenches, hands dirtied with run-on sentences and flawed thesis statements, fingers wearied by clutching a rapidly fading red pen.

It’s at this point that I look back on the semester and consider all the work my students have done, reflect on all the goals I had for them and myself, consider where we are and how we’ve gotten here, and think: “What an awful job I’ve done! How miserably I’ve failed them!” The truth is, I always feel rotten, simply miserable, at the end of the semester. No matter how many students tell me what a good semester they’ve had, I always think about the fact that I could have helped them more: engaged them in more discussion, made more comments on their papers, asked more about their personal lives, and generally been more of a mensch and less of a schlemiel.

This is not a cry for sympathy, however, or a self-deprecating appeal for someone to contradict me. I’ve been teaching pretty much all of my adult life, and I’m not young anymore. I’m used to this feeling, and, like many other feelings I have that are not particularly productive, I acknowledge this one and pass it by, much as a man in the 1950s would tip his hat at a passing acquaintance on the street and continue walking down the block. Part of this refusal to give in to the feeling of desperate failure as a teacher comes from simple familiarity with it. I expect many, probably most, teachers feel this way. Part of it may come from simple inertia; but part of it comes from the knowledge that my students will have to survive many mediocre teachers throughout their academic career, and if I’ve been one of them this semester, it’s part of the experience that they will need to have in order to succeed as students. Like a refrain from Candide, I can say, “It’s all for the best. They need to learn to teach themselves, and if I’ve failed them this semester, perhaps they’ll learn how to do this all the more quickly.”

So, today, as the semester draws to a close, here’s to all the teachers, professors, GSAs, teaching assistants, and instructors who have done the best they could with what they had and emerged relatively unscathed from yet another semester. After all, the best thing about being a teacher is that, unlike the students we teach, we always get a chance next semester to do it right.