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Friday, January 16, 2004
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Teaching.
Professors notoriously try to avoid it. They make funny remarks about it (“Upon retirement,” a longtime humanities faculty member at UCLA once said to me, “every American professor should be issued a rifle and allowed to hunt down and bag one student.”). Many faculty truly madly deeply dislike it, though the dislike dare not speak its name. Others understand that it’s an unpleasantly up and down sort of activity - good days and bad and then good. Fall semester you’re saddled with irredeemably shitty classes. Spring, you’re practically in tears at the spectacle of your students’ charm, knowledge and spiritedness. Here’s why, after centuries of ambivalence, I like teaching now. I have pulled my thoughts together (readers of this blog are welcome to disagree). It has taken a long time, but I have cobbled a serviceable view of the world, of literature, and of engagement with people in public spaces. There are certain writers (Malcolm Lowry, Don DeLillo, James Merrill, Donald Justice) about whom I’m passionate, and I have discovered that when my teaching radiates from the core of this passion things go well. I have stopped feeling self-conscious about my intellectual demeanor, which is basically unevolved graduate student - hyper, curious, un p’tit peu ridiculous. As much laughed at as laughed with. I notice that, after years as a serious singer, I make increasing use of my strong voice. I notice too, that with greater confidence I am occasionally theatrical - yesterday, I imitated in front of my Short Story class the way Gregor Samsa’s voice must have sounded as he tried to talk to his family on the morning of his metamorphosis. Last year, I sang a Prokofiev tune that’s featured in DeLillo's Underworld. Most of all, though, I like teaching now because when I finally decided to offer my students seriousness, it turned out that they liked it. |