Just came back from a quick trip to the mailroom in an attempt to stop the stream of emails reminding me to pick up a package, and I decided to pick up the rest of the English Department mail while I was at it; it's not a long walk and the weather is lovely, crisp and cool, but I resent being required to walk across campus just to retrieve three pieces of junk mail addressed to people who no longer work here plus a package containing a desk copy of a textbook for a class I'll likely never teach again.
It's the futility, stupid--the constant nagging need to perform actions that don't seem to make an iota of difference in the world, as if I'm being paid the big (ha!) bucks just to continue banging my head against various walls day after day.
Sure, I appreciate the opportunity to guide students through Salman Rushdie's Knife, the remarkable memoir of the incident in 2022 when he was stabbed nearly to death in front of a thousand people in Chautauqua, New York, and it's even more compelling to teach this material while testimony begins in the trial of his attacker, but first I had to spend half of a class period providing information about Rushdie's past works and the fatwa and the whole long history that led up to this moment because none of my students had ever heard of him before. These are all juniors and seniors in an upper-level class, but the existence of Salman Rushdie and the attack that destroyed his eye two years ago had somehow escaped their notice.
Don't they read the news? (Probably not, and even if they did, the American media are doing a dreadful job covering the trial and I doubt my students are familiar with The Guardian.) Aren't they being required to read Rushdie's work? (Where? The Postcolonial Lit class isn't being offered anymore and while students may be required to read one Rushdie story if they take our Brit Lit survey, many English majors transfer in that course from community college so who knows what they're reading?)
And when I required them to read the first 50 pages of Knife, why didn't their curiosity lead them to look things up? They could have read about Rushdie online, learned the history of the fatwa, or even looked up unfamiliar words they encountered, but no. When I asked the class why Rushdie compared his wounds to stigmata, I got blank stares. I found myself wanting to use the line Eudora Welty allegedly uttered with a sign whenever she taught a Flannery O'Connor short story: Is there a Catholic in the class? (There was.)
I know my students know a lot of things about which I'm utterly clueless--like who Kendrick Lamar is and why he matters, and why the dice are so weird in Dungeons and Dragons, and how TikTok works. (Sorry/not sorry.) In their eyes I'm probably some historic relic of a bygone age, when educated people read the news and cared about books and understood that on any given day the mail might bring something wonderful. Expecting them to value those experiences is probably just as futile as expecting them to have strong opinions about the Teapot Dome scandal.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly toward the day when no one anywhere will recognize the final line of The Great Gatsby--or care what knowledge has been lost.
5 comments:
Loved this line "when educated people read the news and cared about books and understood that on any given day the mail might bring something wonderful". But it is sad that college students read something and don't even try to understand it. Don't try to look up words or concepts they don't understand. (But, honestly, have you ever tried to teach math to college students who gave up on math in 4th grade? That is too terrible. They were smart enough, but didn't want to put the work in. AARRGGHHH ..thinking of those days reminds me why I retired.)
Beautiful and too true post. I loved the last line. I got the reference! I did, I did!
There are more than a few scholars/scientists of the concept of time who posit that there is no such thing as the present. There is only the past and the future…with no time in between. Students too often don’t care to understand the past, even when it broadens their knowledge and understanding. For instance, they may like Kendrick Lamar but do they know that in 2018 he won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his albums. And then curiosity may take them to an understanding of what Pulitzer Prizes are and why Kendrick Lamar’s award was for something significant to an understanding of the black experience in America.
Great points, all. I confess that my ignorance of contemporary music is a serious blind spot for someone interested in understanding American culture, and my unwillingness to repair that ignorance makes me a lot like my students. Where do I begin?
That's my favorite closing line ever.
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