Q: Does anyone else have days like this? Anything you hate teaching, not because of the students or the work, but just because the subject itself is so overwhelming?
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
An Early Thirsty From Derek in Dayton.
I've just finished my bi-annual teaching of the greenhouse effect to my general-education class. Reading about this subject always leaves me near-suicidal; the hopelessness of our current global situation is so depressing, I have a hard time focusing on anything else for days before or after.
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I get this feeling anytime I see a college student who can’t figure out that $10.00 - $1.80 = $8.20.
ReplyDeleteBut then, remember when Paul Ehrlich predicted in "The Population Bomb" in 1968 that by the mid-'70s, even the U.S. and Japan would face large increases in the price of food, because of food shortages resulting in massive starvation worldwide? It didn't happen.
Remember when it was predicted in 1969-1970 that air pollution would soon make it necessary to wear gas masks in major cities? It didn’t happen. I remember seeing a TV show around the time depicting the world of 2017, with most humans living underground since Earth’s atmosphere had become lethal. So far it hasn’t happened. (And yes, we did think the scene showing hippies in their ‘70s was quite funny.)
Remember when “Soylent Green” came out in 1973? It predicted 40 million people in New York city alone by 2022. It didn’t happen. Likewise with “Logan’s Run,” “Silent Running,” and “The Omega Man.”
Remember that nuclear war with the Soviet Union that almost happened in 1983? It didn’t happen. I have been tickled silly ever since.
But then, most of the stuff in “2001, A Space Odyssey” and “The Jetsons” didn’t happen either. That sucks.
Remember when we were told in 1986 by a visiting professor from Russia that "The Soviet Union is a great, static entity that will last 1000 years, and easily outlast the United States" and we believed every word of it?
DeleteI'm currently an undergrad and one of my gened professors started crying at the end of a class because she would have to spend the next class teaching us about the disease her father passed away from a year ago. All we could do was try and make it easier for her that day. You could hear a pin drop that day. We also chipped in to get her the same flowers that were in her laptop background.
ReplyDeleteThat's a nice gesture... I hope the flowers help her lecture without having a breakdown.
DeleteMore seriously, now: I used to teach a course on Energy and the Environment, so I know how you feel about the Greenhouse effect. I can top this, though. One semester, I had to teach this class to 80 undergraduate education majors. Even worse was that since I was quite green as a teacher, I didn’t know that education majors have the lowest SAT scores in the university, and graduate to the lowest-paying jobs. I grew up thinking that teachers were supposed to be smart and eager to learn, since my Dad was a teacher, and a good one. (In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been caught so unaware. My Dad gladly retired in 1970, having not handled the ‘60s well.) The class had regular organized revolts: it was my worse class ever. One of the worst parts of this was that I had a grossly incompetent department Chair whose modus operandi to avoid all confrontation at all costs.
ReplyDeleteThis department Chair made many issues difficult. One was before the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District ruling that intelligent design was religion, not science, so I was dreading that some fundamentalist student would force the issue and that I would be forbidden from mentioning evolution in my general-ed science course. That if I'd contested this, I might have won gives scant comfort, since I didn't yet have tenure.
Even if I had, though, I resent having to debate the stupid issue in the first place. Likewise with U.F.O.s or most any kind of pseudoscience: I really would rather not have to deal with it. My field is science, not what they're selling.
I have tried, in vain, to give up identifying meteor-wrongs. Meteor-wrongs are rocks that are not meteorites, which amateurs bring me, in the hope they can get me to identify them as meteorites. Although amateur finds do contribute to the science of meteoritics, they are quite rare. A friend who is a genuine expert on meteorites has been presented with only 8 genuine meteorites out of over 2000. Meteor-wrongs can be slag from steelmaking, hematite concretions, other kinds of iron ore, or really any other kind of rock. The trouble with bearers of meteor-wrongs is that their attitude is invariably, “I know this is a meteorite, so I want you to tell me that it is.” I hate getting yelled at, but these people have the nasty habit of popping in unannounced during office hours, so they’ve got me.
I teach a class in Social Psychology (for the record, the whole field is depressing) and near the end of the semester I cover the chapter on Aggression and show clips from Bowling for Columbine and show this hideously long list of school shootings- for which I have had to add new ones every year. Then we try to have a discussion about why we shoot first graders. It is sad but important.
ReplyDeleteI recently wrote something about a tribute to school shooting victims. It was so heartbreaking that I was weeping at my desk while trying to compose it.
DeleteFrom the humanities side of things (other than, like, 20th-century history and other horrifying topics) I get. . . not depressed but something like anxious? despairing? destabilized? when we hit the last couple of weeks of a methods class and start reading on Poststructuralism and its kin. A sort of '. . . now what?" shrug. Interpretive angst.
ReplyDeleteI teach environmental literature every other spring. It's hard, because there is no way to talk about our relationship with nature without discussing the exploitation and depletion of resources, or climate change, or pollution. I often wonder how Bill McKibben (who wrote the End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a general audience, in 1989) gets out of bed in the morning.
ReplyDeleteI also teach Native American lit/film, and Modernism (covering 2 World Wars).
In each case, we face the gruesome truth head-on. But I also look for ways to provide hope for the future. Rachel Carson was one voice, and they tried to shout her down, but she and the people she inspired eventually prevailed. Earth Day began as the brainchild of two senators--one Republican (Pete McCloskey), one Democrat (Gaylord Nelson).
It's always going to be an uphill battle, because human beings seem to be inherently self-destructive. But I keep the fish from Finding Nemo in my head when things are hard to take:
"Just keep swimming, just keep swimming."
I just love this quote from Finding Nemo! :)
DeleteI teach a film history class. Before screening Spike Lee's work, I introduce the issue of white privilege (to my predominantly white students, most of whom have never heard the concept). One student comment this year: "African Americans are so immature--everything's always about racism. So?"
ReplyDeleteTo their credit, about half the class smacked him down.
If it doesn't have a tangible effect on their lives right now, it must not exist or be a problem.
"If it doesn't have a tangible effect on their lives right now, it must not exist or be a problem. "
DeleteSO TRUE! I had a student once write "I don't understand why the book wasted six pages talking about gender discrimination. I have never experienced it, therefore it doesn't exist." My response was "I have never been to Australia, but I'm pretty sure it still exists."
Oh, I am SO using that response next time this comes up!
DeleteIt exists. I've been there. I promise!
DeleteNot because the material is upsetting or anything, but just because I know when I say "MLA STYLE" and start teaching documentation, that I'll have to teach it like my students are 6 years old. Their brains go into FULL shut off mode, and I find myself just teaching it over and over again until the final day.
ReplyDeleteSame for "APA STYLE"
DeleteFSM forbid they learn Chicago...
DeleteI chose some of the works for my myth class specifically so we could address the very disturbing use of rape in those texts. But I didn't realize most of our other texts also had rapes in them. And the ones without rapes have suicides. A couple have both.
ReplyDeleteWorld History since 1500: the whole early 20th century. Totalitarians, depressions, global wars with industrial death, imperialist hypocrisy and cruelty.... Even the history of science/tech that I love ends with big bangs and chemical warfare.
ReplyDeleteRalph Waldo Emerson.
ReplyDeleteJFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?
ReplyDeleteCover that last week. (Yes, Oswald did it)
A student gave me a copy of The Book of Mormon last week. The book, not the screenplay. Apparently I said something unholy in class, and the student wished to cleanse my soul. I thanked hir for the gift. Then, without opening it, I dropped it off at the librarian's office and emailed the librarian to tell hir that the book was a gift from a student and that I wished to donate the book to the library.
ReplyDeleteWhat did I say in class that was so awful? Why did the student think I was a heretic? I told the truth. That's what I did. I told the goddamned, ugly truth about hamster fur.
P.S. To those people who will become parents-in-law in February: Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteDitto. Congrats!
DeleteSame here. And Mazel Tov!
DeleteIn one class, we read and discuss the book: Kamikaze, Cherry blossoms, and Nationalisms, and the futility of war gets me every time.
ReplyDelete