My friend, Ruth, posted a link to this article on Facebook this morning with a note expressing her approval. In the article, Ellie Herman, a teacher at the Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in South Los Angeles, expresses her concern over the lack of funding once showered on the California School system. She argues by making what one of my advisers used to call a ‘paper tiger,’ expressing her concern over the ‘Myth of the Extraordinary Teacher.’ She’s against it.
Her biggest problem with the myth is that it’s, well, a myth:
And that’s my biggest problem with the myth of the extraordinary teacher. The myth says it doesn’t matter whether the crazy kid in the back makes me laugh so hard I forget what we were talking about, or two brilliant kids refuse to accept my rubrics, scrawling their long-winded objections as a two-part argument that circles over every square inch of the backs of their essays — the makeup of the class, the nature of each student and the number of students are immaterial as long as I’m at the top of my game.
She wants people to be more ‘realistic’ about how people actually behave in class and return them from their desert wanderings to the fount of truth.
In response, I thought to write Ruth a private letter expressing my ambivalence about classroom instruction in general. After it went to a half a single-spaced page, I decided to send it to her in a private message. After it went over a page and a half, I decided to post it on my blog and post a link in the comment section.
Here it is:
No version of classroom size works for everyone. Some people (including me) don’t like school, period no matter what size classroom they are in. (I’m sure you remember me as the guy who dropped out of Ripon College in 1981). I value learning, however, and after four difficult years of toiling in the fields of self-education, I went back to college searching for answers that had eluded me in my own search for answers. I had come across a problem in Joseph Campbell that I could not answer.
I ended up with a doctorate in English, but I never acclimated myself to the classroom, which for me was an area where my purpose was systematically misunderstood by people I thought should have known better. People on the Left, where I wanted to stake my claim, thought I was too conservative up because I had worked in a bank while I was out of college and couldn’t get over my academic colleagues’ hostility to the process of making and the difficulty of holding onto money; while members of the Right thought I was far too liberal. In response, the people on the Left vandalized my property and shouted my down rather than listening to my differing views; while people on the Right tolerated my views which they could not understand but which seemed to accord more with with their views than not.
I preferred working on my own. I didn’t begin to shine until I got out of the hostile University enviroment and took my act, which had no or an ill effect on my teachers from both sides of the aisle, on the road. Then, when no one had to listen to me actually expressing my views but could see my views presented in summary in the Papers Presented by Scholars in the weekly review of major conferences all over the country—I did 10 conferences in two years, more than even any professor much less any graduate student—did I get any respect within the department. Only after my advisers finally heard my defense of my dissertation (after SIX YEARS of guiding me through it) did they begin to understand my idea about how literature works.
It was too late for me. I had to endure SIX years of being accused of being a conservative and too liberal at the same time. I felt I was a man without a country the entire time I was in school. I got a job in the private sector, and found contentment AND IDEAS there that were not present in academic environment that I had so recently come from.
From my own experience, I feel that classrooms exist to create followers; the true independent is created outside of the classroom. But I am also capable of recognizing (once again on the basis of my own experience) that self-education is far too limiting to be useful to people who want to learn things in a systematic way. That is why I endured years of classroom instruction despite my hatred of it. In the end it has made me a better, if still misunderstood, person. I am still not sorry I went to graduate school, but I wish people had been more understanding of my differences and less compelled to shout me down without listening to my as-yet-still-tadpole ideas which only emerged in their full frog form after I got out of academia once again and was working in the private sector.
For my part, I do not believe that any solution will be able to close the gap between me and the most horrible parts of the educational experience. Not better teachers. Not the dismissal of ‘myths’ in favor of ‘facts.’ There will always be and inexorable tension between the priests and the outside prophets who turn over the tables of the money-changers in the Temple. And in my experience in America, everyone thinks they stand outside the circumscribed circle. In such a society, the only thing left to do is to paint the ‘other’ in the colors of the priesthood and yourself as a voice crying in the wilderness. In the end, such definition and redefinition is the pointless back and forth of politics. In such an environment, I learned to tune out the politics of Rush Limbaugh and Joni Mitchell—which I maintain are founded on ‘natural’ principles—to focus on what is unnatural in human life.
One of those unnatural things is the myth of the extraordinary teacher. Rather than running away from it back to an elusive ‘truth,’ as Ms. Herman does, I prefer to remember my professors as geniuses everyone (which I truly believe they were), even if they had no idea what I was talking about most of the time (Aristotle over Plato; allegory over symbol, ‘fiction’ over ‘fact’?). I wasn’t the best student, nor did I always have my ideas clear in my own head. It was their tolerance for my intermediate longings, not my hopeless ends—which were limited at best; I prefer to think of the approach I took to the problem of postmodernism in my dissertation as downright wrong—that makes me think so. So I get to the same truth by a different route than Ms. Herman, and I believe different things along the way, including my skepticism over her belief that it is by spending more money that education will be saved.
In my next work of fiction (Art in the Age of Talk Radio), I will attempt to declare my better beliefs (because more solidly thought out) in public once again. After 25 year of being rebuffed by both sides of the aisle, I don’t expect anyone to understand my take on the often severe limitations of learning, education, or even of autonomy that drives me back to an educational fold that doesn’t seem to want me. Conservatives will react to my extreme liberalism, as usual; while liberals can be counted on to circle the wagons around themselves in order to exclude me based on my non-canonical beliefs as they have always done.
Can’t win; still trying. Que cera.
Cheers.