On Dangerous Teaching

Give me danger little stranger
And I’ll feel your disease

I feel every quarter that the classroom is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for me. Dangerous, existentially, politically and psychologically, although I realize that there are other more immediate dangers.

But this danger feels insidious.

Why? Because I no longer have confidence in the Socratic method. Dangerous because I no longer feel that (my) enthusiasm is enough to carry the weight of my students’ needs – needs that are amorphous and complicated. Their need to know grammar, their need to learn how to retain information. Their need to learn – in a very real way – how to think, how to argue, how to analyze. And most importantly, (or not) – my need for them to care about such things.

When I was a young teacher, teaching was about a solo performance: look at me! like me! think I’m smart! think I’m talented: love German, or French or Don Quixote. Now I know it is dangerous at worst and unproductive at best for teachers to seek “love” from their students. Adulation from a chair desk is the cheapest form of admiration. You are grading the person in that chair desk. Are you really going to grade them on how much they appear to love you? No. And what kind of love is that anyway? They don’t know you and you don’t really know them either. You know each other’s behaviors – your social performances in that panoptical space that is the classroom.

But I think my most recent fall from the grace of teaching was when a student informed me that I made it impossible to learn. I was and continue to be haunted by that assertion. Of course it was a terrifically “mean” thing to say to a teacher. But, the problem is: it may be true. It may be all my attempts to engage students through increasingly avant-garde, and unsocratic sets of interventions, are not engaging at all but just alienating (without the pedagogical effect that Brecht hoped for). Friends and family have urged me to forget this student’s statement – despite the fact that it was fairly recent. But I cannot and will not. Because isn’t it even more dangerous – for me and for the people I teach – that I deny all negative assessments, and insist uncategorically, as one colleague does repeatedly, that “I’m a good teacher”?

And so I return to the uncertain, treacherous place that is the classroom. This is not to say that this place is not interesting, compelling, and at times rewarding. But it sure feels scary. A tightrope, where the audience doesn’t know enough yet to decide whether they are with you, or not.

But

An audience that is also on tightropes, walking carefully, hoping to get through college, and not flunk, hoping to get a non-existent job that will pay non-existent benefits. Hoping that the acrobatics of college courses will open up opportunities. And with every step sensing that that reality is no longer viable. Yes, students walk the tightropes too, and the fall is longer. Deeper.

But cancel that. Today, right after I posted, I met a woman at the yarn store. Wearing cat eye glasses a hundred necklaces and a huge plastic cocktail ring, she teaches Communications at UCLA. Untenured.

I TELL THEM THEY DON"T KNOW HOW TO TALK, she cackles at me over enormous knitting needles.

"You terrify and confuse me," one student told her.

"Good," she said.