The Early Posthumous Work

I. What I Did Last Autumn

129 I What I Did Last Autumn “I won’t be in class Friday,” the kid said. “I’ve gotta go squirrelhunting .” My past life as a member of the general public who had attended a number of schools at all levels and spent in aggregate about twenty years in the educational system, and so felt himself to know a thing or two about education and ready to weigh in with an opinion, had not really prepared me to reply. I was nonplussed . I nodded. I was handing out teacher evaluation sheets, that perfect flowing together of sixties’ idealism and the consumer culture, which suggests the student consider his or her education as an extension of breakfast, their teacher another bowl of cereal. Pretty much the way the general public already thinks of it. “Stimulates interest in the subject matter?” the evaluation sheet asks. “Keeps students’ attention? Overall quality of the course as a learning experience? Use a No. 2 pencil; mark A, B, C, D, or F.” By and large the students are very kind to the cereal. Last August, after years of wandering in the wilderness, I was hired on as a college instructor in grammar and composition at a rate comfortably above the minimum wage but a little shy of what a good BMW mechanic might earn. I was ecstatic to get the job; a hundred other people wanted it. 130 The Early Posthumous Work I had taught a class or two as a graduate assistant on my way to an advanced degree, but like everyone else who instructs at the college level, I had started in the classroom with almost no training as a teacher. Understand, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Not at all. Last week a girl asked me about “that animal” I had talked about on Thursday. The Sphinx. She’s a bright girl, talks a lot, charming in her way. The students are pretty much all charming. The ones who have never heard of the Sphinx. The ones who turn in essays copied from travel brochures and old textbooks. The ones who write “they was” and “he were.” The ones who sleep sitting up. And finally and especially, the ones who are curious, although by the time they reach college there are too few of those. Some students want to learn. For others, though, words like “work” and “learn” are old-fashioned expressions, and if your teacher uses them, drop the course. “Learning,” to many of them, is an essentially passive process similar to sitting in the driver’s seat while a chain drags your car through a dark corridor of soap, water, and huge rolling blue brushes. Just as an automatic carwash produces half-clean cars, schools tend to produce halfeducated students. When I came from Johns Hopkins to a large state university in Louisiana, one of my new colleagues said, “You know, the students here aren’t going to be like your students at Hopkins.” After four months here, I think, “How are they different?” The Hopkins kids were brighter, that’s true, but the similarities overwhelm the difference. In both places, the basic relationship between teacher and student is the same. Besides age and an addiction to MTV, students everywhere share one other defining experience. They have been in school for the past twelve years. They know about school. If the first thing you learn up at the front of the room is that students are charming and loveable, the second thing you learn is that teachers are not, at least not necessarily. Steven Barthelme 131 The teacher is the authority, the cop, the person who is forcing the student to be present somewhere he does not want to be and to do work he does not want to do. In a more sinister way, from the university administration’s point of view, the police function extends to weeding out those who aren’t equipped for college, who aren’t going to be here four years, or two. It had never occurred to me that this was a tacit part of my task, that freshman classes were a clumsy extension of the admissions process, or a corrective to it. The teacher is also seen, by the public and, oddly, by the university as well, as the carrier of “knowledge” which he or she is charged with supplying to the students. This transaction is imagined...