I was nervous. Students
don’t understand that teachers are often as anxious as they
are the first time a class meets. It had been more than 20 years
since I’d taught in a college classroom. I felt rusty and
insecure.
My biggest fear? That I’d face a group of
freshmen with their arms crossed and that vacant look on their
faces, daring me to teach them. I was afraid I wouldn’t like
these kids, and that maybe they wouldn’t like me back. It was
a freshman seminar — chairs circled up, pressure to participate, a
set of readings that ranged from Socrates to E.O. Wilson. The
students would write short papers, make several presentations,
conclude with a final paper or project. Much of the class would be
dedicated to free-ranging discussion.
The first day was
pretty much a pass for all of us. We walked through the syllabus,
went over course expectations and assignments, played one of those
awkward ice-breaker games to loosen things up, briefly introduced
ourselves.
I had the whole gamut, a microcosm of American
culture sentenced to spend three months in each other’s
company. Kids from town, kids from farms and ranches, kids from big
cities, a young man from Saudi Arabia, a very tall basketball
player from California, a rodeo rider. One guy blurted out that he
considered himself agnostic, if not atheist. Several others
identified themselves as devout Christians. There were a couple who
could barely be coaxed to speak, and several others who spoke too
much, too glibly. I was reminded more than once of my own children.
At the end of the first day, a student came up to me.
I’d marked him as one to keep an eye on. He was disheveled,
unshaven, seemed arrogant, perhaps too smart for his own good.
“Look,” he said. “Don’t take it personally
if I jump up and run out of class some day. I get these spontaneous
nosebleeds that just start gushing. I’ll be back in five
minutes, but I just wanted you to be prepared.”
Over the weeks, we traveled together into books, ideas, personal
anecdotes. There were days where discussion lagged, others when
things got heated. There were a few tears, some laughter. We
covered racism, religion, the environment, education, social
justice, personal responsibility, the individual vs. society,
climate change. We regularly got pulled off on tangents, which
sometimes weren’t the least bit tangential. I read their
papers. They were the expected range, from well-crafted to pretty
awful, but in every case they represented honest attempts to
grapple with thoughts and issues. I listened to their oral
presentations, marked by adolescent self-consciousness, fumbling
and a few bits of blinding honesty.
Along with Thoreau,
biodiversity and race riots, quite a lot of day-to-day college
angst came to the surface. Roommate troubles, financial obstacles,
how to change majors because you were flunking calculus, family
crises. One day the nosebleed victim had to rush out. One young man
revealed his estranged relationship with his father. Another
confronted his own racism. Some days the class felt more like Dr.
Phil on Campus than a discussion seminar.
During the
mid-term evaluations, I was stunned to find that many of the
students considered this class their favorite. I didn’t think
I’d taught that brilliantly, and in fact, I hadn’t, it
was simply that this approach to education was such a refreshing
departure from the rest of their schedules. Schedules dominated by
huge lecture sections, rote memorization of material, and courses
in which students watched the professor’s back all hour while
he or she wrote equations on the board.
What made it
their favorite class had little to do with me, but everything to do
with the opportunity to say what you thought, to have a forum to
reveal your feelings and reactions, to state, however haltingly,
who you were, and to tug at assumptions. How often does that happen
in school? Unfortunately, not very much. More to the point, how
often does it happen in our families, in our jobs and in our
communities?
By semester’s end, I’d come to
appreciate this group of students, flailing as they were on the
edge of maturity, of figuring out who they were and what had shaped
them so far. And it was clear to me that discussion seminars such
as this would be a refreshing idea for everyone — not just college
freshmen.
Alan Kesselheim is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). He writes in Bozeman,
Montana.
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