When I first started teaching, I lucked into sharing office space with some people who were teaching other sections of the same class that I was. We’d hashed out the syllabus we’d all be using before the semester started up: it was an ambiguously-great-booksy-gig, the perfect start for me since I have literally never taken a college class run on any other lines, except for Greek and Latin. Our setup was ideal: Dante scholar, Latin American history scholar, me; our admin was a professional artist, a painter.
I had never worked with nicer people. After being dealt with extreme skepticism by my first grad program on the occasion of me having a baby, here were some at least who didn’t think that was automatically terrible. (I got the office space because I’d mentioned I’d need to do the breastfeeding-sub thing while working, such kindness, though I was too embarrassed to tell them later that because it was a cubicle-esque thing, I would never never be able to let the sound of the pump be overheard.)
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But the thing that immediately became brilliant was that when everyone got back from teaching, we all had the same idea: it was time to talk about what on earth had happened. We were nonchalant; the subject had to be casually introduced.
The painter helped the most. Instead of Pressing Intra-University Issues, we had to figure out a way to segue into talking about class: how did something land, how did a book land that day? What was the critical mass of reactions, and what worked and what didn’t to open the first most intuitive reaction, up past the reflex of the knee?
There is nothing like the visceral relief of talking to adults after being penned up in a room with just-past-the-years-of-teens. College-age is one of my favorite ages to talk to, but the charm is partly because they haven’t yet had enough happen to them to give up, embrace the death of their souls. So it provides the charm, yes, but the lack of experience can be wearing: how many times like a toga-wearing greek god on a stage can you make yourself mention that your audience will probably change their mind, due to the hard won fruit of the bitterness of experience? I can’t do it as often as I see it. This is why having an adult or two around is such a profound relief, as long as they too have not given up, either—the frisson of common experience, what you come to feel as a baseline of action and existence, the sense of other beings in the universe, talking back to you, on purpose.
It’s hard to imagine trying to learn how to teach without being able to get immediate, experienced commentary on the hardest emotional aspect of teaching: the day to day brunt of being locked into the necessity of responding to someone it is your job to persuade, who won’t be persuaded, not from conviction or habit but just being dazed, cussed, ornery, and confused while trying to hide it. Well, that’s the hardest thing for me: as a student, I hated the condition of this, and this being the vibe of the social set too. I spent months in undergrad testing out not talking to anyone in class at all, just to avoid the hangover from that set of helpless confusions.
So, for a whole year (the class was a two semester one! just for this year) and to a certain extent the following three, it was easy to have the after-class conversation that I’ve never quite found the substitute for. You can’t post the details of student reaction online, obviously; it’s only the very most positive things that are at all appropriate to mention, or the once in a lifetime bad class that becomes a watershed, becomes revealing. (In my opinion this latter is only revealing if you’ve taught students from radically different economic backgrounds, but that’s a tale for another day.)
So each day after I teach, these days, after standing up for three hours straight at a time and lecturing extemporaneously as I’m going through a text largely line by line and seeing where that takes the group of people I’m talking to, I’m looking for something, anything, that isn’t an audience. And I do have colleagues for whom, fortunately, talking about pedagogy is not a contest but a joy—but we all teach on different days—and some people even teach at the unholy hour of the night.
I started out writing here with thinking about the various ways the genres of the internet satisfy our desire to talk to other people, or not. Often a slight change of genre makes a world of difference, with even lovely results. Am I romanticizing the serendipity of having three people to talk to for year about what has become my work for more than a decade? I don’t know what to do with the pent-up energy of wanting to talk about class. Other than tell a story. Let’s see if it works.