The first class I ever taught was scheduled right after one taught by the most popular professor on campus. A cultural anthropologist who had traveled the world, he handed out chocolates and told stories about drinking tea with the Dalai Lama. This was a man who wore a yeti-size Tibetan lambskin coat and got away with it. I’d walk into a room of fresh-faced young things, rapt with fascination, their eyes aglow. Then they saw me, and their faces dropped like stones, teletype broadcasting across their foreheads: Oh, her.
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The first class I ever taught was scheduled right after one taught by the most popular professor on campus. A cultural anthropologist who had traveled the world, he handed out chocolates and told stories about drinking tea with the Dalai Lama. This was a man who wore a yeti-size Tibetan lambskin coat and got away with it. I’d walk into a room of fresh-faced young things, rapt with fascination, their eyes aglow. Then they saw me, and their faces dropped like stones, teletype broadcasting across their foreheads: Oh, her.
I’d come a bit late to academic teaching, but I still had memories from when I was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, where I wandered the red-brick, tree-lined paths daydreaming about life as an English professor. All my students would love me, the way they loved the most popular professor there at the time, Dr. Kaufman, who ran up and down the stairs of his crammed lecture halls joking about how he wanted to be the Oprah of academe.
One not-so-secret truth about teachers: We want to be admired. Nobody posts on Facebook about the student who stopped by at the end of the semester to let her know that she was “boring and rambled on about dumb stuff nobody cares about.” But we also know that learning isn’t always fun. Teaching is similar to parenting in that the right choices aren’t always the popular ones. The easiest way to win over students is to assign little work, praise them for everything, and spoon out A’s.
My desire to be liked, as a new teacher, made me soft, while my Catholic guilt demanded standards. Striking a balance wasn’t going so well. My first reaction was to blame my subject, freshman composition. I mean, had any young person ever stood on a desk and yelled, “O Captain! My Captain!” in reaction to the rhetorical triangle? But when I tried to be cool, assign McSweeney’s and Kanye West lyrics, that didn’t work, either. The bovine collective sat and stared. I felt worse, like an idiot trying to be hip with the kids.
I leafed through old student portfolios in my office, searching for clues to up my game. It turned out they had been left by a young man who may have been the most popular teaching assistant of all time, and who had just graduated. I guess he was too busy basking in the glow of his awards to clean out his office. Rumor had it that he’d taught his lesson on assumptions by arriving dressed in a suit, asking students to describe his ethos. Then he’d strip down to a sleeveless T-shirt and tattoos: “Check my tats. Who do you see now?”
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He must’ve had great ink: The portfolios were stuffed with glowing, reflective letters from students describing how the class had changed their lives. The guys were sincere; some of the women wrote on scented stationery, including their phone numbers with invitations to “hang out sometime.” There went my idea that freshman comp couldn’t inspire.
Of course, scented phone numbers are not necessarily evidence of great teaching, but unmotivated students aren’t going to learn very much. Yes, I hate those movies where the teacher puts on a leather jacket and explains to the disenfranchised youth about how poetry is like rap and they all go win a spelling bee. I also have to admit that, back in my undergraduate days, I toiled for Dr. Kaufman, poring over the readings and papers, determined to stand out. The talk is all about “student engagement” these days, and at least some of it must be true.
Most of us are not going to engage our students by sporting tats on our muscular male forearms. Here we reach yet another complication: At least one study reports gender bias in student evaluations. Maybe it’s not coincidence that all three idolized instructors I’ve mentioned from my past were men. What to do?
There are no easy answers. I’ve been teaching for nine years now, at four colleges, in four corners of the country. I’m still sorting out my responsibilities from my students’.I’ve had terrible evaluations and great ones. I’ve gained and lost a chili pepper on RateMyProfessors.com. I suppose I’ll never be the Oprah of academe; I say “um” way too much. I have to assign quizzes and response sheets to make sure students do the reading.
Still, I try to motivate students, in part by trying to help them see someone worth working hard for, even as I refuse to adopt roles such as the Nurturer, the Beast of Burden, the Cheerleader, the Schoolmarm, or whatever other stereotype they seem to want to project on me. It could be that my attempts are working, or that I’m more like Matt Smith’s Doctor Who, insisting that “fezzes are cool” while Amy Pond rolls her eyes. Either way, I suppose I’ll just keep making my students rhetorically analyze Amy Schumer clips and Ms. Marvel until they choke on my hip feminist modernity.
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I realize that this essay mimics my classroom: I just keep tossing out ideas and telling stories in the hope of connection. I believe that the crux of what I’ve been working toward here is a pep talk — hang in there, you. Teaching is hard. Give yourself a break, and keep experimenting. We can’t all wear Liberace-inspired lambskin coats, but we can each find our own way.
One last story from my first year of teaching. There was a teaching assistant who ignored the common textbook. Instead his students watched all of Twin Peaks in preparation for one paper on one question: “Who killed Laura Palmer? (Support your claims with evidence.)” For the final, the class performed the group dance from Boogie Nights on the college lawn. This was the best comp class ever taught in America. All we can do here is admire how this teacher flew so close to the sun as he did the funky chicken.