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Well, it’s three
a.m. and I can’t sleep for all the coffee I swilled in night class
last night. I only did that to quiet my hungry stomach. I did not
have time to grab something between classes. Perhaps I would have
used the 15 minutes I thought I would have once I got there,
however, those were used up driving around and around Kelly looking
for the building in which nineteen students were eagerly awaiting my
wisdom. I got there at 5:30, exactly when the class was to begin,
after asking some stranger for directions (thank God I’m a woman and
I can do that), so begin we did and we were off and running.
The men—you will
remember that my class is made up of nineteen grown men—groaned
about the readings I had given them for the evening: Franz Kafka’s
“Letter to My Father” (they saw him as a whining wimp), William
Carlos Williams’ “Use of Force” (they liked that one!), Sylvia
Plath’s poem “For Daddy” (they hated this one worst of all). Whew! I
had my work cut out for me—and with no dinner to boot, so coffee
was, initially, my only friend in the room.
We began with
Kafka. They shot out criticisms about this wimp of a man who
complains about his strong father. Somewhere in the conversation I
asked everyone what he (it’s nice here: I don’t have to decide what
pronoun to use) believed: do people come into this life with some
sort of predilection for strength or not? In other words, is it
possible that Franz Kafka was not capable of being the typical
“Kafka” male he felt the pressure to be? Not surprisingly, most in
the room thought that men are “self-made.” However there were a
couple of comments tossed out about the different types of strength
and a few ventured into the deep waters of declaring that perhaps
certain strengths cannot be imposed upon a person unless he decides
to accept and embody that imposition. Then, the black man from
France brought up genetics and how we need to remember that each
individual is a product of both the father and the mother. Perhaps
Franz was expressing his mother’s genes. This scientific explanation
seemed acceptable to most and we ended our discussion allowing poor
old Franz to have his wimpiness and blame it on his mother’s genes.
Truly, I think
this was a breakthrough!
What was
fascinating was when we got to Williams’ “Use of Force.” The guys
liked this one. As we went into discussions on this piece, the men
bantered about the weak parents and how the doctor took control of
the situation and got results. Again, it was the one European in the
room who thought it was unethical for the doctor to take such an
adversarial position in relation to his patient. He thought the
doctor was a moron, unprofessional, and unethical—that the doctor
should have risen above the pettiness of the force of wills. Every
other person in the room—all good strong American males—disagreed.
Oh yeah, I agreed with the European. We battled the European’s point
of view against the American male’s point of view for a long time
before one older man brought up the idea of looking at it as a funny
story shared by a doctor. One of the most vocal of the men, perhaps
the youngest man in the class (mid to late twenties) finally got
frustrated and berated the entire process of searching for meaning.
At this point, I
summed up the whole thing: Both perspectives are valid, one can look
at this story as strictly comical or one can dive deeper for
meaning. As your English teacher, it is my job to help you see
different perspectives and to dive deeper than you might ordinarily
do. Certainly, I never want to force a meaning down your throat (no
pun intended on theWilliams’ story). Discussing the various
perspectives of the pieces we read is what this class will be all
about. You can count on the fact that we will look at the language
of a piece and ask questions about why the author might have used
such language (as Williams used adversarial language in his story).
How about a ten minute break!
During the entire
ten minute break one man told me all about his disability and his
arthritis as I patiently listened, feeling the entire time that I
really should go to the bathroom and feeling that there were
students behind me that wanted to chat as well. It wasn’t until an
hour later, I finally called a ten minute break announcing to the
class that I had to take a bathroom break and making no eye contact
with this sweet arthritic student, fled the room to take a much
needed pee break and rest in the silence—or near silence—of the
women’s restroom. I chuckled to myself that one fringe benefit of
this job is that, for once, there is no line for the ladies’
restroom!
Oh yes, I need to
back track to the beginning of class. We began with Hawthorne’s “The
Minister’s Black Veil” and got a fairly decent discussion out of
that. The young talkative man read a bit in a mockingly
old-fashioned tone and everyone got a laugh. Then, we launched into
Dylan Thomas’ “The Force that through the green fuse drives the
flower” They were groaning about poetry initially with one older man
asking why poetry needs to exist on the planet at all! By the end,
with the help of the young talkative one, we survived the rough seas
of poetry like a bunch of old sea salts. I truly think they got it
and had a healthy respect for the power of the sea after getting a
little salt in their lungs.
At nine p.m. I
asked them to get into groups and assess the class thus far: Are
they getting what they want and need? How do they feel about the
discussion? Is there anything else they are looking for that they
are not getting from me, their teacher? After about ten minutes I
asked for feedback from the groups. Turns out they like the
discussions and the way the class was going. There was only one
concern about turning in a journal entry on essay due dates and that
was a simple fix: they still write the journal but they can turn it
in the following week.
And the war
towards compassion continues….more next week.
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