Yelping Toward Bethlehem
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I wonder, if the technology had somehow existed, whether or not some student could have come away from a conversation with Socrates and gone to RateMyPhilosopher.com: “Guy doesn’t seem to know very much for sure. I’m looking for more certainty. Very low rating from me.”
I wonder if some loaf-and-fish-eating listener, had he heard the Sermon on the Mount, could have stepped away to rate Jesus at RateMyRabbi.com: “Dude is really idealistic. Pray for your enemies? He tells people to love their enemies as themselves?? Aren’t you supposed to hate your enemies, by definition? I mean, who does he think he is? Avoid this rabbi.”
And I wonder about whether or not the democratization of information (and necessarily, misinformation) via the Internet has led to a kind of unearned entitlement from people conditioned to see themselves, ever and always, as enlightened consumers. I think it’s demonstrably true that as the Internet has bloomed, expertise has been conflated with just another opinion, and common opinion (never in short supply, let’s be honest) has become unavoidable, ubiquitous, and awfully loud.
At the risk of sounding undemocratic, there are hierarchies of value where opinions are concerned– and that idea seems to erode yearly in America and maybe across the world. I would suggest it’s part of the reason a “Reality TV” star is in the White House and he imagines his children make effective advisers, instead of experts on geopolitics, diplomacy, science, Intel, and military strategy. I am reminded of the moment in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day when Senator Lewis very rightly points out to well-meaning and duped Lord Darlington that politics is no longer a place for gentlemen amateurs. Would that the current President were more gentleman, and less amateur, and that his advisers were longer on expertise and shorter on opinion. This is not a digression; this Presidency is indicative of a culture that holds its own ignorance to be the equal of an expert’s knowledge.
Where education and consumerism are concerned, I find Mark Edmundson writes convincingly of the troubling aspects of student as cool consumer in his book, Why Teach? “I do not like the [evaluation] forms themselves, with their number ratings, reminiscent of the sheets circulated after the TV pilot has just played to its sample audience in Burbank. Most of all I dislike the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses. I’m disturbed by the serene belief that my function — and, more importantly, Freud’s, or Shakespeare’s, or Blake’s– is to divert, entertain, and interest.” It is fair to ask, surely, whether or not a teacher needs to be “entertaining” or “likable” to be effective in exposing students to the material of the course. Probably that’s helpful in any event, but has it become essential to please one’s contemporary American students in order to successfully teach them anything?
For my part, in two years I’ve amassed quite a lot of internet-based disdain. Ratemyprofessors.com posters allege, for example that I “set students up for failure,” despite the fact that all quizzes in every class I teach are open book and open note, and that I will make line-by-line corrections of their drafts before they turn them in, if they can get them to me in a timely fashion (3 students out of every class of 32, on average, take advantage of this). Some of the Net-based aggrieved complain I am “rude” or that I “lack social skills” and although I always try to be courteous, I understand that some may not like my personality, nor my sense of humor, or maybe they just don’t like that they didn’t get a good grade.
I rather like what Professor John McIntyre of Loyola University has to say about this matter, in his YouTube video, “One final point: my manner and my sense of humor may not be to your taste. Admiring me is not a course requirement. I might add that in 21 years of teaching this class, on Ratemyprofessors.com my hotness quotient remains zero. But one of the reasons you are in a university is to experience different personality types, different senses of humor, different approaches to the world. I am not the only jackass you will ever encounter in your adult working life. Use this semester as an opportunity to polish your coping skills.” McIntyre is addressing the potential static between an experienced teacher and students who probably conflate the value of a course with their personal opinion of the professor, which is (of course) nonsense. I didn’t particularly care for my Drill Sergeants in Basic Training, but I learned how to shoot a rifle and detonate a claymore mine all the same. I did not, however, have the opportunity to “drop” my “classes” because I “wasn’t feeling it.”
For all the Internet-invective directed at me, many of my students have very positive things to say about their time in my classes. Not long ago I received this particularly encouraging email from a student who took my Critical Thinking class:
“Dear Mr. Converse,
I am writing this letter to express my gratitude to you for all the things you have done for me this semester. I am grateful to you for not dropping me out of the class after I had missed four classes and for understanding my situation. I am also grateful to you for showing us a class all the resources available to us on campus, such as the ESSC. I did not know this resource existed and I probably would not have gotten a B in this class without it.
Lastly, I am grateful to you for being a great instructor with an open mind. I did not know at first what to expect out of this class when I had registered for it. It was simply a requirement I had to fulfill. Now that it is over, I can truly say that it was a class I very much enjoyed taking. I also know that it would not have been the same experience had I taken it with a different instructor.
As you may already know, I was born in Iraq and I immigrated to this country with my mother ten years ago. My experience in American schools have not always been pleasant, especially in my first few years here. I was bullied throughout middle and high schools because of where I am from. Most students and sadly even some teachers looked down on me and treated me unfairly. I was often accused of being associated with terrorists and told other comments of that nature. On the first day of class, you had mentioned to every one that you were a US army veteran who had served in Iraq. Honestly, this was a major concern for me. I was afraid that you would treat differently and with bias. I knew you could probably associate my last name with where I am from. As the class went forwarded, you made me realize that you were not that kind of person. You treated me just like any other student in class. I felt safe to speak up and express my opinion about the subjects we were discussing. I thank you for that.
I realize this may not seem like a big deal to you as I am sure that you treat all of your students equally. It was a serious concern to me. Two years after the 2003 war started in my country, a misguided mortar fell through my second-floor classroom during an Arabic composition class. Reportedly, the mortar attack was intended to target a US military outpost nearby the school. After the attack, which had killed one of my class mates, my mother refused to send me back to school for three years out of fear for my safety. Shortly after the war had started, my mother was hired to work as an interrupter for the US army and had to travel to the “Green Zone” everyday for work. In 2008, after having worked there for three years and getting dozens of death threats from local terrorists for being there, we finally had decided that it was time to leave the country. That’s when we had applied for a visa to the US. That’s probably enough about me, but I really wanted to share a little bit of my story with you.
Again, I thank you for the great class that we had and for teaching us to think critically. I wish you the best of luck and hope to see you on campus sometime.
Sincerely,
XXXXXXX”
My English teacher’s class motto, those many years ago, was this: “Education should be like a gun to your head.” Educators serve their students best when they challenge them, teach them to question the world, and even unsettle them with ideas that force them to examine their own assumptions, conclusions, and worldview. Sometimes that makes people (particularly people whom advertisers and web-designers work tirelessly never to discomfit) uncomfortable, even hostile. If popularity, affability, comfort, safety, and entertainment are one goal, and an education that challenges students to be their best is another, then I’m reminded of the Japanese proverb: “A man who chases two rabbits will catch neither.”
