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Beautiful Dreamers
- University Press of New England
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15 Compared with high school, teaching college is a breeze. By the time a person gets to college—especially if that person is an older student—all the reasons for not being in school have been dealt with and disposed of. I lecture and my students listen, even if they don’t always pay attention. I give an assignment and they go off to their computers to work on it. But as I said in the beginning, there are always “times” when my expectations are not being met, when my college students have lost the “spark” and become as intractable as high schoolers who are distracted by the world without, don’t see themselves producing anything worthwhile, and wonder whether they wouldn’t be better off simply finding a job. That’s when I head for the elementary schools, down to that sea of waving hands and eager faces, to remind myself that “teacher” is one of the most beautiful words in the language. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p beautifuldreamers Somewhere along the line, during my college teaching career, an assumption (or directive) arose in American society that everyone should—must—go to college. The results have been, in a word, mixed. This prescription often yields nothing but misery for people who became convinced by the “everyone in the college boat” campaign that if they did not get a degree they would fail. I once had a student—Jason (the quintessential male undergraduate student name)—a milk-faced eighteen-year-old who was personable, sociable, and articulate. When his first biology test turned out to be a disaster, I asked him to stop by my office for a chat. He came in, took a seat, and the dam broke. (I have to admit here, up front, that I hate it when my students 16 p c l i e n t e l e cry. I never know what to do. I recall a young woman who stood face-to-face with me in my office. She suddenly burst into tears and I could sense, from her body language, that she wanted me to hug her. I didn’t, and she wrapped her arms about herself, administering the embrace that she must have sensed would not be coming from me.) Jason told me he was desperately unhappy in school. “Then why are you here?” I asked him. He sniffled and shrugged. “My father told me I had to go to college.” There ensued a brief but heartfelt conversation during which I posed the questions, “Is there anything you do well? Anything that you love?” Jason wiped his nose on his sleeve and then smiled. “I like to work in the garden,” he said. “I like to plant things.” I sat back in my chair and gave him the one piece of unsolicited advice I felt he needed: “Then get out of here and go work for a landscaper.” Jason actually followed my advice. I didn’t hear from him for three years. Then, one day, a postcard arrived. It bore a photograph of a magnificent magnolia tree in full bloom, with Jason standing in the foreground. On the reverse he had written: “I have my own business now. I’m happy. Thank you.” Jason was only one of many students I’ve had who were treading water in the hope that somehow, miraculously, their toes would finally touch bottom and college would suddenly make sense to them. He was occupying a desk for the worst possible reason: the fear of failure if he didn’t pursue a degree. As it turned out—before Jason got religion and indulged his passion for petunias—his was a classic case of someone letting college interfere with his education. There are, at this writing, over four thousand colleges and universities in the United States. It is overkill. Americans are, by and large, particularly ill suited for hunching over books, parsing sentences for their inner meanings, and writing endless dissertations purporting to have identified Emily Dickinson’s boyfriend. [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:02 GMT) Beautiful Dreamers p 17 Lest I be criticized for a radically bad thought, I’d like to point out that I am, in fact, simply echoing an idea that was first put forward by Alexis de Tocqueville, the peripatetic Frenchman who, in 1831, toured the United States and produced a mammoth report...