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INTRODUCTION Mary DELESE’S PIECE REMINDS ME of so many classes with so many of those students who are Over It. Over you with your enthusiasm for the book, over the book with its repetitions and unnecessary sexuality, over liberal humanism. What is coded with their attitude, Delese perceives, is resistance to talk of AIDS, behind which lies a deeply held bias against homosexuality. She wonders , Are there some values and beliefs so firmly instilled in humans that they are beyond teaching? What a great question. In a culture where values can be zapped with the remote, the slow pace of reading and entering another’s world can be, I suppose, tedious—especially if the slow pace takes one unerringly where one does not wish to go. I wonder that same question about values and bias when I face the misogyny of my computer art students.They disguise their disdain for women by that Over It attitude. I taught Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, in my myth class one quarter. Big mistake .“Isn’t this a bit too feminist?” one boy asked. Obviously, he had nominated himself to pose the question they all, especially the girls, had been gossiping about. The hostility toward the subject of wild women astonished me, dismayed me. Delese expresses some of this astonishment and dismay with her medical students who resist reading a book meant to stretch their empathy, if not their imagination. The fault lies not with the assignment. There is an issue here about the Over It attitude that we teachers face when introducing ideas that come up against firmly held biases. But the whole thing is, What other point is there in teaching but to challenge those firmly held biases? 163 NINE Teaching Martha’s take on teaching reminds me of my own student years of, as she puts it, disengagement. Ah yes, I remember those hours at those desks, scribbling . We were to learn logic, I recall: a math requirement. I found it more amusing to write down his sentences not for my notes but so I could imitate him back at the dorm. The subject did not, to put it mildly, engage me. Subsequently , Martha found herself on the other side of the desk, a terrifying place to be. She discovered something I think any good teacher knows: to teach, one must be subversive. She found her teaching to be personally incompatible with the structure and nature of schooling. Instead of teaching “school,” she began to think about herself and her students as real people in a real world. She asks if there is a place in the classroom for weeping. Good thought. Very good thought. I have only had a few classes where there was weeping, but I will tell you those were the memorable ones. Those were the ones of engagement, all eyes working. The entire classroom atmosphere changed and we became, for one another, real people. My own take on teaching in this chapter is via a circuitous route. I use a dream to prompt thinking about what has weakened my teaching.Two images provide what Roland Barthes (1981) might call the “punctum” of the dream. The word means “sting” or “sensitive point in an image.” The two images are Clearing the Grasses and Released Snakes. Both images relate with what Delese and Martha call for in the teaching-learning act: a clearing away of dearly held beliefs so as to release more startling, perhaps even frightening, ideas. If our students are disengaged or just plain blasé, the teaching act could use more sting so that learning might begin. TEACHING: A RETURN TO WONDER Martha I remember speaking the words without having planned them. “Teaching has become an integral part of my identity.” It was 1998 and I was introducing myself as part of a presentation to the faculty I now call my colleagues. Whatever did I mean? Was it the absurdity or the unexpectedness that caused this moment to etch itself into my psyche? In any event, the words have stayed with me, echoing from the margins of my consciousness as I have settled into this current chapter of my life in educational settings. I spoke the words with what I imagine seemed like unwavering confidence; as if I knew myself well and, more remarkably, as if I had a clear understanding of the nuanced complexities of teaching. Now, in retrospect, as I find myself engaged in yet one...

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