-
What I Say and What They Hear
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
32 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p whatisayandwhattheyhear “I have a sin of fear,” wrote the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne regarding his unsteady faith in God. I also have a sin of fear, but it is a far more mundane one: that I will see the contents of one of my student’s notebooks. As I stand before my class, lecturing, my students look like court stenographers, their pens wagging without letup as they try to get down on paper every word that I utter, as if I were a prophet and they were creating a historical record for future generations of the faithful. It’s a deceptive image. Even though it looks as if they are transcribing my lecture verbatim, what winds up in their notebooks is anything but. I know this from grim experience. It’s like this. Every so often, once my students have vacated the classroom, I spot a notebook that has been left behind. Damn, I think. Now I have to pick it up. My hope is that there will be a name on the cover, which means I won’t have to open it to look for one. But more often than not there is no identifier, and I must crack the notebook to seek out some i.d. In the course of my search I can’t help but notice their biology notes, as well as ancillary scribblings. It is like spotting the Rubber Man at the circus. I simply can’t look away. These books of revelations contain information that falls broadly into three categories of the remarkable. Let me enumerate them. The first category comprises unsolicited editorial comments —running critiques of my lectures. For example, during the ecology section of my general biology course, I detail how eating lower on the food chain makes more food available for everyone . “It takes one hundred pounds of grain to make ten pounds of beef,” I narrate as I show the class an overhead transparency of What I Say and What They Hear p 33 a lump of ground beef next to a sack of feed. “Do you think you could feed more people with ten pounds of beef or a hundred pounds of grain?” Heads nod and pens dance. But after one such lecture I found a notebook on the seat of a desk. Heaving a sigh, I approached it with cautious abandon. My heart sank when I saw its blank cover. I picked it up and paged through. Still no name, but in the margin of the ecology lecture notes was the gloss, “Save cows! Eat a vegetarian!” Other interesting asides I’ve collected over the years are: “Darwin is stuped! [sic]” “I just don’t understand this.” “Why is he teaching us chemistry? I though this was biology.” “How old is Klose?” The second category is the caricature, generally flattering. In the forgotten notebook of one young woman—apparently with time on her hands—was a detailed sketch of me with a big bobble head and itty-bitty body, along with the comment, “Nice sweater.” On another occasion a student had sketched three faculty members, including me, and labeled us, in turn, “good,” “bad” and “ugly.” (With craven disregard for the feelings of the other two, I feel compelled to report that I was the one labeled “good.”) Both of the above categories provide me with modest interest, but the category that truly disconcerts me is the one that records comments I know I never made. For better or worse, these are the types of notes that best tell me whether or not I am getting the information across. Evolution is a major tar pit of misapprehensions. I take great pains to emphasize, for example, that Darwin never used his theory of natural selection to explain how life on earth originated. He only sought to describe how species have physically changed in concord with an ever-changing environment. But this does not stop some students from making wild statements in their notes, one of the preeminent being, “Darwin said it was natural [54.84.65.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:25 GMT) 34 p c l i e n t e l e selection instead of God that created the earth. This is how humans came to be.” What does one do when one stumbles upon such a comment? (My reaction is almost as strong as...