Standing in front of my students felt like slow death. Especially the morning class. They stumbled in half asleep and acting put out and pissed off. They didn’t want to be there. I didn’t feel like entertaining them enough to make them want to stay. We played our respective roles. It was a small class – summer classes tend to be. Ten students. Three are asleep in their desks. One absence. Another, a California blonde with big blue eyes and boobs that were probably a graduation present from Daddy, was focusing on another text message. The remaining five were exchanging knowing glances along with the occasional smirk and eye roll. I was standing in front and going through my lecture on the post-revolutionary war period. My voice echoed the same as if I were lecturing to an auditorium of a thousand empty seats. I told the students (like I told myself) that the echo was caused by the cement block walls. We met in one of the older buildings on campus – the same building where the physical education and kinesiology department was.
My prepared lecture was on the Whiskey Rebellion. The students were mildly interested at the mention of booze; but once they realized I was talking about an actual historical event and not a block party, they went back to tuning me out. Maybe I wasn’t being fair to them. But somehow, I don’t think so. Just as I got around to explaining how the Articles of Confederation helped create the conditions the led up to the Whiskey Rebellion and how it, like the American Revolution, was mostly about taxation, Mandi the epic text messenger, suddenly chimed in.
“What do taxes have to do with slaves?”
I was accustomed to interruptions, and there was even a time when I welcomed them. But I hadn’t been interrupted in a while. I composed myself and reminded myself that every moment in a classroom is an educational moment. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking that maybe this will be the time that the switch will flip in Mandi’s cute little head and she’ll go from being every frat boys favorite slice to a real student. “Taxes had nothing to do with slavery,” I answered. “But, like the Boston Tea Party, taxation led to…”
She rolled her eyes. “Didn’t ANYBODY care about the slaves?”
“Uh.” I swallowed and regrouped. “Of course slavery was a divisive issue for the Founders, Mandi. You’re right about that. But the Whiskey Rebellion…”
“And didn’t we end up beating them anyway?” She was smacking her gum, chewing like cow chews cud.
“Who?”
She rolled her eyes like punctuation. “The CONFEDERATES? Duh. We BEAT them, right?”
Fuck me. “Uh, yeah, Mandi. Though you’re confusing the Articles of Confederation with the Confederated States. And really, there was no US and THEM in the Civil War. It was Americans killing Amer…”
“Well I don’t care,” she proclaimed. “Slavery is just WRONG.”
I was about to respond when her cell phone went off.
Sigh. “Yes Mandi. You’re right.”
My classes were back to back. I got the luck of the draw, because summer classes normally didn’t work out that smoothly. My second class met in a slightly smaller room in a slightly newer (by a decade) building. that would have been fine, except that it was a larger class. it was almost a full class. twenty-five students. The packed in feeling added to the general attitude of displeasure and intellectual malaise. I took attendance, started my dog and pony show about the Whiskey Rebellion. I had prepared myself mentally for another Mandi. There were several to choose from.
Sometimes I felt guilty for grouping my students like that. When I started teaching, I went out of my way to learn all my students’ names. I saw them as individuals. I saw teaching as not a job or a career, but a vocation. When I ran across a some professor who clearly didn’t feel the same passion I did, I assumed they were what was wrong with the system. Higher education was hemorrhaging apathy. And, as I saw it, the individual teachers carried much of the burden. I thought about my professors. Some of them were passionate. A few were crazy. One or two were influential, at the time. Many of my professors, thought, regardless of what they taught, were distant, burned out wraiths. The tenured ones were more concerned with their research and gave the tedious duty of teaching to their TA’s. The rest found ways of coping – drinking or chasing co-eds or excessive exercise. I had a medieval history professor who cross stitched in his spare time. As you might imagine, he lived alone with five or six cats in the same house that he once shared with his widowed mother.
When I got into teaching, I had no clue as to what I was doing. But I knew one thing. I knew I didn’t want to be one of THEM. I wanted to be passionate and inspire my students to be passionate learners. I loved history – especially American History – and I wanted my students to love it, too.
But somewhere between the multitudes of Mandis and the hemorrhaging apathy, I stopped caring. Teaching history turned into telling the same joke one hundred times. After the first seven or eight times, you can’t convince anybody it’s still funny.
Thankfully, no one in the second class spoke up and it ended with a resounding silence and the sounds of flip flops slapping against the tiled floor. I looked at my clock. 11 AM. Theoretically, I was supposed to go back to my office for a few hours – just in case some poor little student had a question or wanted clarification on something in the book or lecture. No one ever showed up. The only time most of them talked at all was if they were trying to negotiate for a higher grade.
I looked up and the classroom was empty. The only evidence that a class had been there was a textbook that somebody left behind. I felt around in my bag and pulled out the flask I’d filled with bourbon before I left home, and took a swig.
That was the best part of the day.
