Can't curb my enthusiasm

As a department chair and a member of the committee that makes recommendations about tenure, I get to read a lot of course evaluations, and I'm puzzled by a statement that pops up frequently across the campus: "The class would be better if Professor X realized that not everyone is excited about Topic A."

I get that comment occasionally on my own evaluations and I see it on many others, and I wonder what I'm supposed to do about it. The fact is that I already realize that not everyone is as excited as I am about the topics I teach; indeed, if everyone in the world were as excited as I am about American literature or writing or poetry, I wouldn't need to teach it: students would be knocking down the doors of the library in their eagerness to soak up everything they could discover about the topic.

So I understand that many students are not excited about the things I teach, but I'm puzzled about what they want me to do about it. How should this realization affect my teaching? I could stand up in class on the first day and say, "I realize that many of you are not excited about Topic A; therefore, I'll be teaching Topic B instead." Or I could take a poll and see what topic excites the most students in the class and teach that, but I can envision some problems with this approach. What if I don't know anything at all about the topic that excites them the most? If I could teach a class in how to be rich, thin, sexy, and popular without any effort (Topic C), I wouldn't be an English professor. And then what do I do with the outliers who really aren't excited about Topic C? Regardless of the topic, some students are bound to be bored by it.

Maybe students just want me to curb my enthusiasm and pretend that I'm as disgusted with the topic as they are: "Class, I know American literature can be a real drag and writing about literature isn't your idea of a day at the lake and studying poetry isn't going to make you rich or thin or popular, but we're all in the same boat so let's just be miserable together like those four unnamed guys in Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat,' and speaking of 'The Open Boat,' don't you just love the way Crane manipulates perception so that the boat seems to be standing still while the beach rises and falls? And how about those shadowy sharks? And what the heck does he mean by the 'sacred cheese of life' anyway?"

No, I'm afraid my excitement about Topic A is incapable of being held in check. But if I can't curb my own enthusiasm or teach the topic that excites the most students, then how am I supposed to respond to that puzzling comment? What do they want me to do?