| Nov. 20th, 2007 @ 11:37 am Why Teaching Occasionally Stomps on Your Heart (and Other Times on Your Face) |
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I just finished up a pair of courses at a local liberal arts college -- overall the experience was good, but they don't have any work for me past this quarter, so I'm back to community college until I either get a full-time academic job or give up and go get a real job. This is the first time in a few years that I've been able to design a class pretty much from the ground up (barring the constrictions of the course itself) -- I was able to pick my books, which is a luxury that I had back at OSU as a grad student, but haven't enjoyed since.
One of the books I picked was Michael Chabon's _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_, a book originally suggested to me by my aunt, of all people. It is a huge, sweeping, beautiful book about comics, golems, and shooting Nazis in the Arctic, among other things. Sadly, it is also the reason for the title of this post -- my students didn't really bother reading it. Some who did liked it, but some thought it was boring (my interior response being "IT'S GOT HOUDINI, GOLEMS, SUPERMAN, ORSON WELLES, IMPLIED GAY SEX, AND DEAD NAZIS! WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU NEED TO ENTERTAIN YOU, YOU GRABASSTIC MORONS?" bellowed in my best R. Lee voice). And I would have just left it at that, if not for the fact that these kids are actually supposed to be arts and humanities majors for the most part (with a few nursing students, some of whom will soon learn what true hell is like, since they had a hard time keeping up with the easy reading schedule of my class). One of my colleagues taught the same book, and she said her students were even more negative about it. They see 600+ pages, their brains flip off. They see a reference to a famous person, and the hyperlink is dead -- no connection.
They liked (for the most part) the movies and TV episodes I showed in class, but the books -- I just don't think they understood them, ultimately. There's a big difference between reading the words and understanding the web of references those words create. I loved that web of references, from the first time I started seeing it (probably back in middle school, but definitely by high school) -- it's the only reason I went on to be an English major. Synthesis, forming connections between works and ideas, is the basis of all higher-level Humanities learning -- and because I can't travel back in time to high school and make them pay attention to English class then (or teach the books to them properly, as I've encountered in a few cases), there's little chance that I can help them develop their own web of connections now. Part of my problem is that I was stuck teaching freshmen -- 18 year olds just aren't interested in anything that they are told is for their own good, no matter how true that statement may be. So I'll hold on for now, and chose to remember the connections that I did see several of my students making -- maybe that will be enough for me, ultimately. |
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