My tea is getting cold.
As December wears itself threadbare into an unswerving New Hampshire winter, I have to keep a space heater in my office. If I want to get any writing done, I have to remember to give the room an hour to warm up, seeing as how my building’s archaic take on heating is a single, rust bucket of a gas heater at the other end of the apartment. Sometimes I loathe how much my actions are based on the temperature gauge—my activism blanketed in a liminal state of dissipating warmth.
* * *
In the college essay-writing course that I teach at the University of New Hampshire, I often find my role as teacher to be lukewarm. That pessimistic cliché often parades as true for me: “Those who can’t do, teach.” Is that me? At age 28, am I already to feel comfortable being the one to leave after my students, as if I’d given up all pretense of doing the things I try to teach them to care about?
Lately, I’ve decided to start dispensing with the typical rules of teacher-as-authority. Half of my students can grow a thicker beard than me anyway, so why pretend I’m some well-published Ph.D. in tweed and elbow patches? This attitude has been inspired by two assigned readings we covered a few weeks ago: John Gatto’s “Against School,” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
The first is one of many diatribes Gatto wrote as he left the New York City school system after thirty years of teaching awards. His biggest reason: American schools are based on a Prussian philosophy that seeks not to enhance individual thought, but encourage mindless conformity. Let the strong test-takers become our politicians and artists, and let those allergic to the honor roll fall through so that we have plenty of cogs for the manual labor force.
I was hoping that the irony of reading this essay as a homework assignment wouldn’t be lost on my class. I all but encouraged them to riot against me as a representative of “the system,” but they just sat there, hands in their pullover pockets thinking that, maybe this time, I wouldn’t catch them texting.
In the MLK, Jr. piece, I similarly tried to get a discussion going about the part towards the end where, after a pitch-perfect combo of logos, pathos, and ethos, King entreats his audience to action, calling them lukewarm accepters. He says that outspoken segregationists were more respectable than those who just sat there nodding along.
But they just sat there, nodding along.
* * *
Though it wasn’t preached on much in the nondenominational Christian church of my youth, I noticed that the Bible had some strong words on indecision. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” In Revelation, the church in Laodicea is criticized for being tepid: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
At this point in my journey of faith, I often feel like tepid God-spit. I don’t go to church, and, I oddly feel my spiritual worth renewed when critics boldly speak against contemporary Christianity, as Stephen Fry did last March for Intelligence Squared’s debate on Catholicism. Yet, I find myself with my forehead against the kitchen table every morning, struck by the redemptive frailty rendered in the Psalms.
So, who am I to criticize my students for not going to any events for the campus-wide Gender Identities Awareness Week? I encouraged it and lauded the cause as I stood in front of the chalkboard, but I didn’t attend any of the events either. I agreed with their work, and for some reason, I figured that was enough for now.
* * *
In a sense, my role as a teacher is a lot like my current role in the interfaith world. I believe that common ground will lead us to action, and I get nervous when posts like this one by my prolific colleague, James Croft, suggest that finding equal footing can leave us with broken ankles.
However, the reason for the unease is because I’ve started to get too comfortable with my own peaceful terminology. Common ground can be a good thing, but we can’t just run around calling for it and then leave the conversation sitting there to reach room temperature.
In fact, MLK, Jr. would agree more with Crofty on this. He established common ground first so that he could boldly and logically tell his supposed fellow clergymen that they were closer to Klansmen than allies. He didn’t start there, but he went there.
I want to go there.
I want to leave my tepid tea behind, and let the leaders of my youth know that homosexuality doesn’t preclude a genuine faith in God, and that abortion isn’t the only issue that matters during elections. And I want the nonreligious to know that I’m not suffering from a God Delusion, or some spiritual opiate to numb the harsh realities of life and death—that it has the ability to be the opposite of escapism. I still want to reach common ground first, not because it’ll turn us into the Prussian nodders that Gatto warns against, but because it’ll be a lot easier to blaze new trails if I know there’s a community to return to and help keep my temperature rising.
Thanks Bryan! I’d write more, but I need to go turn up the heat 🙂
tell me about it. i’m using my teapot as a hand-warmer right now!
Interesting – how is it everyone in my life refers to me as “Crofty” at one time or another? I feel like I’m back in high school! =D
I recently took a course with Harvard Professor and Community Organizer Marshall Ganz, and he set us a reading which resonated with me strongly. I forget the author, but the gist was that if you don’t make at least 20% of the population ENRAGED by your political speech, sermon, blog post or whatever then you haven’t said anything worth saying. He links this to the inability of Democrats to craft a compelling narrative message – they are too eager to please, “tepid” in your words. It seems to me you might be feeling the need to outrage some people, Bryan!
On thing on teaching and authority: I was convinced by critiques such as Taylor’s, Illich’s, Freire’s, Holt’s etc. until I worked as a high school teacher in a very disadvantaged area of London. There I learnt that often the teacher’s authority is an essentially component in helping students craft the tools they need to assure their intellectual freedom.
It is interesting to me that your students, you suggest, seem disengaged from some parts of the material they are supposed to be learning, and at the same time you are withdrawing your authority. It seem to me you might want to take a firmer stance and encourage them to prick up their ears (which I’m sure you actually do)!
I hope I didn’t dredge up any bad nickname memories. I kind of have a penchant (ailment might be a better word) for constantly nicknaming people. It’s a term of endearment, rest assured! x]
And yes–rage and me. We’ve never really been the best pals. I think that almost any guiding paradigm (be it religion, or, in Gatto’s case, the American public school system) has the potential to use guilt and anxiety as an antidote to any kind of rebellion, just or otherwise. So, I’m still coping with how and when the time for rage is, and how it fits in with my generally passive, hand-wringingly nervous writer-self.
As for the teaching, thanks for the exhortation. Teaching at a predominantly white, state-run University in New Hampshire has definitely taught me a lot about how to interact with increasingly tech-drenched students. Because the college is surrounded by farmland, and not as rich in diversity as they’d like to claim, it makes bringing up issues of diversity that more uniquely complicated.
So, when I say, dispensing with typical authority, I’m referring to the stodgy English prof stereotype they all walk in the first day expecting. Therefore, I have found that, while it is indeed a very tough balance to maintain, there is an element to “breaking the 4th wall” per se, that is an effective teaching style with college freshmen. I have found that they respond to narrative more than any text I throw at them, and so, if I want that narrative to be effective, it means a larger dose of transparency than we’re normally taught.
It may sound silly or trite, but if I can tie in the Fair Trade meal I prepared the night before into a lecture on Eric Shlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” the reactions I elicit from them are far more animated and introspective–again, the last things they anticipate an English class will do.
Bryan,
I find myself struggling with luke-warmity frequently, myself. Teaching in the community college system also presents itself with some unique challenges (some of my teenage students have babies, for example. Others have known real gang violence or domestic abuse). This is not to say, of course, that students who attend traditional colleges and universities do not know hardship. But, it does seem that my students have had a few lessons at the school of hard knocks, in the way that my UNH kids never seemed to.
At any rate, issues of texting, of failing to hand in homework assignments, of strolling in late to class–these are much easier to address than the issues that should be addressed. I’ve tried a few times to get them interested in writing about their neighborhoods, about getting them involved with how writing can really change things, but they either look at me blankly, or look at me like I’m the one who should be taking a class. Obviously, there is something I’m not privy to. I’m not sure, but I think it’s that writing has no place in their world. When students tell me that the internet has made them “more smarter” than people 60 years ago, they honestly and wholeheartedly believe it. In a way, maybe they are: they know not to get too involved in their schoolwork. To give me what I assign and nothing more. To keep detailed records of their own grades.
I look at them and think, some of these people will go far. I can’t help but think that the reason is because they’re working the system properly, something I’ve never quite been able to do.
To get back to being luke-warm: I don’t know how to get them revved up. They already know (without knowing it) that getting angry about an issue, that getting heated and worked up and fiery…that all that leads only to two places: one is nowhere, and the other is great glory (of course, that second one also means you’ll be hated, at least by some). The odds are not favorable one way or the other. You assure yourself non-failure if you adhere to the rules. Give the teacher what she wants. Raise your hand if you have to, but never volunteer more inforation than necessary. It’s a safeguard against becoming a statistic, I guess.
My students are not a ragtag bunch of misfits, looking for a leader to guide them through their educational poverty. My students are looking to just break in to the middle ground, where nobody cares who you are or where you came from. They can’t risk defeat. As a result, I am defeated. I don’t know how to make it work, how to get them to care, how to show them that really living is about mobilizing efforts to change the world. Worse, I can’t get myself to stop playing the Sims long enough to do whatever it is that needs to be done.
Wow. Yes. Full agreement. I don’t have much to add. Your last paragraph pinpoints a huge issue in a way I’ve never been able to describe. Sometimes it’s scary (and pathetic) how much Hollywood seeps into our lives–that we are the bright light in the dark world of not just negativity, but lukewarm mediocrity. It’s not Goodwill Hunting, but yet I keep thinking I’ll rouse them to greatness. I guess the problem is that it’s often my idea of greatness, and that if they don’t leave my class with a firm grasp of critical awareness, then, my first instinct is to think I’ve failed. So, I set up my own system of success, and then come up with my own definition of failure–something has to be wrong there!
Still trying to decide whether to post a comment on this one. Should I? Shouldn’t I? I should!
By the way, I love MLK’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail. One of the best letters ever written.
Excellent post, Bryan. Your title caught my eye as soon as I saw it, but I didn’t get a chance to read it until now. I’m really glad you mentioned Gatto’s Against School – that is definitely one of my favorite cranky diatribes of all time. Looking forward to following more of your work in the future 🙂