Just Some General Observations Concerning Teaching College Freshmen:

• When it comes to choosing paper topics, it is my older students who are more likely to pick something light and fun; it's the younger students who pick dull, heavy topics like abortion, immigration, gay-marriage, etc.  There appears to be something about growing older that causes one to lighten up, take one's self less-seriously.
• The super-majority of the time, students who pick the "heavy" topics (e.g. abortion, etc) do so not because they are passionate about the topic, but because they are lazy and unimaginative.  This assumption is proved by their writing.
• Drug-users (both current and ex-) are usually among my strongest writers.  Conclude from that what you will.
• Students from truly turbulent countries--e.g. Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, former Soviet Republics, etc, rarely tell personal stories from their home countries.  I suppose there are just some stories that war-survivors won't even share with their closest loved ones, let alone their freshman composition instructor.  Understandably.
• A roommate suggested that maybe these international students don't share their war-stories because they perhaps consider their tales too common, too normal, to be worth attention?  Americans, by contrast, perhaps consider any personal tragedy to be a strange and great thing, for we don't ever expect tragedy to occur to us; hence, Americans will write long and dramatically about a car-crash where everyone survived, while a civil war survivor who saw his family butchered won't even think to bring it up.
• Or, perhaps these refugee-students simply don't have the words for their experiences--not in English, maybe not in any language.  I don't know which of all these explanations is more tragic.
• A native English speaker can absolutely jack-up one's own language--misspell, mis-punctuate, mis-capitalize, write both run-ons and fragments, etc--but they will still always use the indefinite article (a, an, the) correctly.  It's uncanny.
• Conversely, a non-native English speaker can master every other element of English grammar, but still mess-up the indefinite articles--Romance Language speakers over use them, Asiatic Language speakers leave them out.  A misplaced "the" gives them away immediately.  Articles appear to be first English grammar principle mastered by natives, yet the last mastered by new-comers.  It's uncanny.
• It is the A- students who are most likely to take me up on my offer to let them revise their papers for a higher grade; the B, C, and D students only take me up on the offer sporadically.
• Of the lower-graded students who do take me up on it, most only make the most superficial corrections to their papers, often ignoring the notes I've made detailing what they can do to improve their paper.  I no longer give these students higher grades for just turning in a token "revision."  At such times, I consider withdrawing my offer to let students revise their papers.
• But on the same token, I get just enough outliers who take my offer seriously and turn in superbly improved revisions, that I don't dare withdraw my offer.
• One of the saddest sights you'll see are the occasional students who clearly coasted through high school as class clowns, but who now find their antics no longer amuse their classmates nor get a rise from the teacher. The emperors have no clothes.  I almost pity them.
• But again, some of my most engaged and interesting students are high school flame-outs who are now determined to salvage their life.  I wish them good luck and godspeed.
• In a similar vein, it is also perversely gratifying to encounter the occasional former-honor-student who previously coasted by on sheer ability and teacher indulgence, who now suddenly realize that in college, one actually has to try.
• Whether because the blood is draining from students' brains to their bellies post-lunch or what, early-afternoon classes are usually my least-engaged, poorest attended, and hardest to teach.
• Night classes tend to be the funnest, presumably because they are populated by adults with day-time adult responsibilities, and, as earlier noted, it is grown adults who tend to lighten-up.
• Genuine tragedy seems to render people more charming, thoughtful, and interesting.  Bitterness, by contrast, is naive.  Again, draw your own conclusions as to why.

Real Problems

Words I thought I'd never type: I enjoyed the last stake high council speaker at church.  Normally when these speakers are announced, I crack open a book, play on my phone, try and flirt with the girl next to me, or even just drop all pretense of paying-attention, conk my forehead on the front-pew and take a nap.

I'm largely uninterested in yet another string of luke-warm platitudes constructed around such hard-knock life-stories as "I was a star center/quarterback/home-coming-king at East/West/Skyline/whatever who was AP on my mission then immediately married high-school-sweetheart/the beauty-queen/a model, attended the U/the Y/USU to became a lawyer/dentist/CFO, became rich and successful as a matter of course at everything I touched because monetary wealth is a clear sign of God's approbation and blessing," and "sired my race of Aryan superman through which I could vicariously fulfill my juvenile and sophomoric teenage fantasy to win the state basketball championship."  (I'm not even exaggerating about that last bit).

So it was genuinely refreshing to hear a story from someone who'd actually had real problems--we heard from someone who was divorced with kids and inactive in church when he remarried his girlfriend of 10 years (they didn't get sealed in the temple till a year later); someone who once had to work 4 jobs just to make ends meet; someone who was laid-off from his grounds-keeper job at 49, so went back to school for his Associates--not his BA, MBA, or Doctorate, but his Associates--which took him 6 years.

This was someone for whom tithing was once a sincere test of his faith, for whom there was never a clear, guaranteed light at the end of the tunnel, for whom the church was perhaps once a burden than a support, someone who's genuinely suffered emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, yet somehow got through with his sense of humor intact--that is, for once, I heard from someone who actually had something to say!

These are the sorts of people I actually look up to--these are the sorts of folk that I suspect God can actually do something with--that in the eternities, I have the gut-feeling that it will be better for these passionate ones than all the MBAs, beauty-queens, and high-tithing-payers of the church together.

Song of Solomon

So, I was reading "Song of Solomon" a couple weeks ago.  Quick, which Toni Morrison novel is an episodic narrative concerning an ensemble of eccentric and pseudo-mystic African-Americans living in the colored ghetto part of a post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights Midwest town, and includes an open and frank discussion on bodily functions and gender relations?  The answer of course is "All of them."  After trudging through "Sula" and "Beloved," Morrison was precipitously close to being yet another one of those important-sounding-authors that I respect more than I actually like.  Nothing personal against her, maybe I'm just too white or too male, or even too 21st-century to totally get what she's doing.

Of course, I used to say that about Victorian novels, too--I read "Middlemarch" you see, and I found the whole affair to just be so dreadfully stuffy, petty, and foreign to my American sensibilities to feel accessible.  Who cares if understanding English class-structure might help me comprehend the book better, bollocks on the whole thing, good-riddance to England and viva la revolucion! 

But then, "Great Expectations" and "Jane Eyre" were both written in that era--indeed, neither of those novels could be written today, given how much has changed since then.  But there is still something hauntingly personal, something distractingly familiar, about these characters, that cause self-reflection and  an aching longing, so that even though they are thorough products of the Victorians, they've long outlasted them.

I had a similar experience once I breached the second-half of "Song of Solomon."  Now, doubtless there are simply certain facets of the novel I still haven't comprehended simply because I haven't experienced being Black--just as there are doubtless parts of "Great Expectations" I don't get because I'm not a Victorian Englishman.  Nevertheless, somehow the character of Milkman Dead, as he engaged on that most banal of plot-devices--the buried-treasure hunt--transcended the text in that second-half to become something far more real, a character who was alarmingly familiar, one who both condemned by association the worst in me while mapping out the best of our potential. 

He doesn't transcend his circumstances, oh no--he transcends because of his background, his family, his roots, the whole, strange, wild, eccentric, sordid, mad, lunatic pageantry that produced him.  The book made me consider how much more I should value my own strange family-ties, in a manner that no mere greeting-card salutations or maudlin-Hollywood-celluloid could ever do.  No, "Song of Solomon" has blood and guts to it, it feels, it strikes, it's as messy as life--it's head and shoulders above "Beloved."  And in the climactic, self-destructive finale, I'm tempted to thinnk that Milkman really does fly away.