The Intelligentsia

I had promised before last week’s post that I would contrast being a teacher with being a student, and then I forgot. That right there, although I am a teacher, is typical behavior of a student. Just so we are clear on that. But one thing that might help clarify why I might make such a studentish error is that I am currently taking an online class, delving into the depths of my experience to try to find that erstwhile student within myself once again (10 points, Katherine, for the use of “erstwhile.”) (An interesting turn of events here: the use of “erstwhile” is more typical of student than teacher, at least brown-nosing poser wannabe-comp-lit-grad-student students, whereas awarding myself points for its use is much more of a teacher behavior).

My online class is called “The Holocaust and Human Behavior” and is given by Facing History and Ourselves, a wonderful yet sneaky organization that will not allow you access to its online educational resources unless you take one of their classes. We read readings, watch videos, and reply to discussion board postings on an array of topics from identity to inhumanity. I am mostly taking it in order to get access to their online resources, indicating yet another typical student-ism: students take classes for the credit, prestige, or reward they will get from them, but often accidentally learn something in the process. Anyway, from my unique vantage point of both student and teacher—teacher by day, student by night—I can offer the following insights about the foibles and graces of each role:

1. Teachers LOVE LOVE LOVE to assign Journal Entries. Students hate them.

Every teacher’s edition of any textbook that you pick up will tell you to have students create a reading journal, or a history journal, or a vocabulary journal, an Algebra II journal,or a you-name-it kind of journal. How many journals are kids supposed to keep? I always hated journaling, whether in my own journal or in school assignments, because of the problem of audience. Who on earth IS the audience of a journal, anyway? God? Yourself at 80 years of age? Your snooping mother or boyfriend? And if it’s a school journal, there’s that whole privacy-vs.-teacher-reading it thing that is weird and only really works in The Freedom Writers.

As a teacher, I would TOTALLY ask students to journal about their goals for a course at the beginning. But as a student, I think it’s bullshit.

2. Students ALWAYS think they have more work to do than the teacher, and are always wrong.

I know my students are convinced that I go home and drink wine and eat chocolate covered cherries in a steamy bathtub, of which time about 5 minutes is spent absentmindedly devising lengthy, time-consuming assignments for them that will burn up their entire weekends, when really I spend almost every waking hour either at, working on, or thinking about school, and when they don’t do their homework I want to bash their heads in for having the nerve to think they simply “don’t have enough time” for everything.

Our online facilitator for this class sends us one email a week and poses a discussion question and a brief response to our responses. I mean, come ON. (Just kidding, Mark, if you ever read this, I hope you can see this is almost all for rhetorical effect. Isn’t the page literally dripping with sarcasm? It might not come across as well on Internet Explorer, but try Firefox and I’m sure you’ll see it. I know you do work. And I’m not just saying that as your student because I want you to like me. But I do want you to like me. You like me, right?).

3. Both students and teachers are excellent at the art of bullshitting. The difference is that teachers can usually tell when students are doing it.

It’s so funny to me to read/listen to some of the things students say when they’re bullshitting. I know EXACTLY what they’re doing, and A) I could have done it so much better, even just done the bullshit so much better, not even the real thought, although I could have done that so much better too, obvi, and B) I feel kind of ashamed and uncool for giving them an assignment that they would have wanted to bullshit.

That’s one thing I think students really don’t know. Is that their teachers still want them to think they (the teachers) are cool. And if they (the students) don’t, it can bring us right back to being the 4th-grade outcast all over again (on the inside, where it counts).

4. Student homework is SO MUCH MORE FUN and easier than teacher homework.

GOD, it’s easy. And at least you get to espouse new ideas and sometimes be creative (at least you do if I’m your teacher, I like to think). It gets old just looking for Constructive Ways to Improve things. It’s like being the editor of a magazine that’s cool and a little edgy, but just not quite top-tier enough to get the already-polished Updikes and Hertzbergs, although if YOU, the editor, put in enough work, maybe someday those writers you groom will go on to publish in The New Yorker and forget about you.

5. The only parts of online discussion I read extremely carefully are the responses to stuff I wrote.

I suppose this is a student-confession. Teachers tend to think online discussion is SO VALUABLE but for us insecure students, it’s just another venue for people to [hopefully] tell us how awesome and smart we are and how much they love our opinions.

6. Both teachers and students learn things. Lots of things. Whether they expect to or not, and whether they think they ARE learning anything or not.

The class has dredged up a lot of memories for me thus far, and conflicts within myself that often lay hidden, but something about being in a student-role again is making it easier to access them (I’m sure the subject matter of the class helps just a bit, steeped as it is in identity, awareness, questions of we-and-they, stereotypes, choices, insecurity, belonging, etc.). It’s always chastening to realize that as enlightened as I think I am, I still sometimes behave in craven ways. As open-minded as I am, I still unfairly judge others. As intelligent as I am, I still say stupid things. As secure as I am, I still subtly put others down to make myself feel better. Or at least more powerful. As cognizant of white privilege as I am, I still take advantage of it every day.

We had to make “identity charts” in our first week of class, with our names in the middle of the page and a web of traits that describe us attached to the center. I did it with a certain amount of begrudging acquiescence usually reserved for education classes that make you do elementary-style activities to model elementary-level strategies. Among the “identities” I put on my chart were female, lesbian, Southern, daughter, sister, Libra…but not white. We could look at the charts of everyone in the class, and as soon as I saw someone who listed their race I felt ashamed. Not of being white, really, but of allowing myself the luxury of forgetting about race as a factor of identity, a luxury I have ONLY because I’m white. The ways in which I am a member of a minority or a historically-oppressed group were quite salient—but I put my ZODIAC SIGN and forgot about my race. Wow.

So it’s chastening to be on the student side of things again, for a little while. And comforting to realize how much I still have to learn.


Also, as an unrelated PS, GAWD, this is funny.