Midsemester

As we have reached the middle of December, most schools have reached or are approaching the end of their semesters. Many colleges sent their students home after Thanksgiving, finishing the remainder of the term virtually.

When I was a student, the winter break between semesters was my favorite, a poignant period perched between two provinces where you were never quite the person you were constructing at school but couldn't quite return to the person you were before you left. The interval was deliberately packed with doctor's and dentist's appointments where medical professionals would try to make small talk about collegiate life while examining your nose, teeth or genitals. My ophthalmologist would remind me without fail that his son, also matriculating, was "majoring in girls," an assertion of which the intended response remains a mystery to me to this day. This period was also filled with a rolling series of reunions, parties and unexpected meet-ups at bars, restaurants and grocery stores. As underclassmen, these meetings were spent subtly one-upping each other about the amenities on our respective schools. Your college has a quadrangle? Well, mine has four, actually, which makes sense seeing as its the oldest/largest/best university in the region. It's a burden—the pressure, you know—but we make do. Eventually, once most of us realized that things like that don't matter, seeing old friends was less about the shininess of our new lives and more about how quickly we could fall back into the wonderful patterns of the old ones, as if the gulf of miles, experiences and social groups disappeared immediately and we would always be cocksure, carefree teens whenever we saw each other. Perhaps it always would.

The pandemic has taken such a toll on education from the students who have received a fraction of what they need because of the uncertainty of in-person and virtual classes, to the parents who have scrambled for childcare in the wake of unpredictable schedules, stressed about the efficacy of a menu of bad options and taken on a heavy in-home educational burden, to the teachers who have put themselves on the front line enduring daily potential spreading events while simultaneously trying their best to create engaging, effective online curriculums. I even feel bad for school boards who are flying blind in a fairly unprecedented environment with never-satisfied forces pressuring them on all sides. Many have stumbled (and continue to in some places), further darkening the reputation for a body that wasn't too well though of in the first place. "First, God made idiots," said Mark Twain. "This was for practice. Then he invented school boards.” College students aren't being punished as much as grade schoolers (a less than effective semester when you're most important class is Intro to Psych isn't nearly as costly as one in which learning to read is on the docket) but much of college is about becoming a social individual, a prospect weakened when you have to social distance. For many teenagers, the inter-semester period will look no different from any other day in quarantine prison.

Recently, I said goodbye to some of these teens as my semester as an adjunct professor at the local university wrapped up. I am not a teacher, I don't have the qualifications to mold young lives officially but the school offers a program for incoming freshman that can be taught by people without post-graduate degrees, driven by the idea that if the instructor comes up with the topic, it will be something that they are passionate about and that that passion will be palpable to the students. My friend Laura Palmer introduced me to the concept many years ago when I was looking for a stimulating outlet for my free time, encouraging me to propose a syllabus under the pretext that instructors of this program were all people just like me, with day jobs and lives that have nothing to do with academia. I found out quickly that that wasn't the case. During my orientation, we were asked to go around the room and disclose what our class was about. One by one, serious looking people announced things like "I'm a tenured professor in the sociology department and my class is about scarcity in the third world" or "I've taught theology here for 15 years and my class is 'What Aquinas Means Now: The Summa in the 21st Century.'" I was the only non-professor in the group and so I felt a little sheepish declaring "In my class they're going to watch the movie Jaws and then they're going to read the book Jaws and then we're going to talk about the differences." Still, teaching this course has been one of my favorite things to do and I'll be forever grateful to Palmer for suggesting it to me.

The fact of the matter is I like being around a college. I like big leafy campuses and musty old buildings, I like cork boards with group announcements and sublet offers on them, I like lazy frisbee on well-kept lawns. I must be genetically predisposed for this stuff because my elbows are preternaturally sharp, running holes in the elbows of my jackets, necessitating professorial patches (there's also the fact that my mother taught journalism and English colleges for years, but I'm going with the elbow thing). Even this year, when in-class teaching was done in small groups with masks until COVID cases in Iowa dictated that all classes become virtual, leaving me "teaching" to a Zoom grid of black squares, the energy of being around learning is exhilarating to me.

It also makes me very hopeful. There's a lot of talk about "the radical left" on campus creating a culture of politically correct authoritarianism and it's troubling to see stories about professors and school officials bullied, suspended or fired for reasons that defy common sense by the outcry of out-of-control students participating in groupthink bloodletting. Where I teach, a small liberal arts college, would seem to be ground zero for this kind of thing but I've seen little evidence of it. Of course, I teach freshman and it's possible that they haven't come far along in their liberal indoctrination but for the most part, I find the students to be mostly apolitical, more concerned about their social lives or their majors. I've had a few students request extensions on papers for vague mental health reasons or demand insight into assignments that I would never dream asking a teacher for when I was a student but those are the exceptions, not the rule and such students surely existed in the classes I took all those years ago. It should be obvious that this is only my non-scientific anecdotal evidence from a handful of classes at only one school so take this with a grain of salt. Of course, on a college campus in 2020, anecdotal evidence is now known as “lived experience” and is to be taken as the bedrock of truth so if you don’t believe me, you are denying a tenet of my very identity.

If there is something troubling that seems to be ascendent on campus, its the idea that the students, by the benefit of tuition, should be able to dictate how they want to be taught in the way that a diner should be able to request how they want their steak prepared. The school is endlessly supplying students with surveys to rate every aspect of their experience, a concept—education as an "experience"—suggests the expectation that anything challenging or difficult is negative and therefore rooted out. Student feedback can be helpful and the school seems to have a good handle on what is constructive and what is not but overcourting the student's opinion inverts who has the knowledge and who is seeking it. An education is not a steak. The better analogy is that a school should be a gym for the mind, and a gym member would be wasting their money if they asked the trainers not to make them do anything challenging, difficult or strenuous. Oscar Wilde described the personality of a good university student as the ability to play gracefully with ideas, a great teacher encourages you to play hard.

I'm fairly positive I am not a great teacher. I want to be liked too much to be a demanding grader (for more evidence that student feedback is incomplete, my high marks at RateMyProfessor.com have a lot to do with the fact that my class is practically impossible to fail). My class is about movies, hardly the stuff of great import, but I try to instill the idea that learning is an ongoing exercise. Schools are the best kind of gyms because the instructors are teaching you how to build the weights and treadmills to use on your own. I want them to know they are stronger than they realize and have greater power as individuals than they can imagine. I hope some of that came through this semester, even through masks and over internet connections, though, Wilde also notes that nothing worth knowing can be taught. I am also loathe to reveal too much of my own opinions, a tricky feat in a class about a subjective art form. Another staple of culture war hand-wringing is that impressionable students are being brainwashed by leftist professors ramming their ideology on the kids. That may happen elsewhere but I take great pains to avoid it in my class. My guiding principal comes from St. Augustine, who said "For who is so stupidly curious as to send his son to school that he may learn what the teacher thinks?"