Concerning two students

"You don't want to be me--you want to be better than me." Thus sayeth King (Lebron) James in the tagline for his new Nike commercial.

When I saw it on Sunday, I thought, Okay. Catchy. Inspiring, even. Does he wear the shoes he's pitching, or--so as to allow others the chance to be better, does he keep on wearing what, I assume, are shoes that are inferior to the ones he's pitching? And then the game came back on and I stopped wondering. But then later that day via an e-mail exchange with a former student and a conversation yesterday with a current student, I found myself thinking about that commercial and realized something:

I think I'm doing something wrong.

You see, I do my best as an instructor to make clear to my students in various spoken and unspoken ways that teaching English is somewhat akin to how that nun in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise feels as she's addressing JAK Gladney: "If you believed, we wouldn't have to." Emphasis on "have." There's the course content, but there's also the Life of an English Instructor, an existence that, as I mentally gird up my loins and reread the readings I've assigned or contemplate the just-turned-in stacks of first essays for this newly-begun half-semester (What? Already?!), at times makes me feel a deep, even spiritual kinship with Sisyphus. Yes, I tell and show them (see? Good pedagogical technique! Multiple ways of conveying that which is being taught!): mine is a life in which, Job-like, I mentally don sackcloth and ashes and cry out to the gods I call deans and my department chair, "Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?"

And yet: within the space of 24 hours, that former and that current student told me that a) they had come to the conclusion that teaching English was a Good Thing for them to pursue as a goal; and b) that I had something to do with their decision.

"[Your Anglo-Saxon-rooted expletive of choice here]," I thought.

It's hard to wail via e-mail, so I didn't do that in my correspondence with my former student. In my conversation with my current student, though, I could not help it: "Oh, [current student]! Please tell me something I said or didn't say is not the cause of this!" I cried out, my voice echoing up and down the stairwell. (See?? Even my daily route from my office to my classrooms mimics Sissyphus's . . . and a coincidence?-I-think-not! alert: In Spanish, one word for "classroom" is aula; the word for "cage" is jaula). My current student thought I was joking, though, and smiled broadly at me as she said that, yes, I was the cause of this decision--though she did also say that secretly she'd always loved English.

(That did bring me some comfort, I must admit: Her malady is in part genetic and not entirely environmental in origin.)

She wanted to know, now that she had become thus afflicted, what she should do about it. So we talked. You gotta know other stuff besides the usual "English" stuff, I told her, since people who write poems and such have the distressing habit of writing about stuff besides the writing of poetry and such. You know the adage: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, write poems and such. And those who can't write poems and such, teach them." So we gotta know enough about those things which we can't actually, like, you know, do, in order to, like, talk about them.

But here is why I'm writing all this: as I talked with each of these students about their decision--as I earnestly and honestly conveyed to them that this decision didn't exactly guarantee them gainful employment, much less the sort of income that'd make them want to cash their paycheck and dump the resulting currency on their beds and then roll around in it, I admit to feeling a sort of happiness--not the perverse happiness the Pied Piper must have felt as he led all those children to who-knows-where, but more like that happiness that Camus attributes to, of all people, the aforementioned Sisyphus:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

But then King (Lebron) James's admonition comes re-echoing down the pike that is my memory, and so I want to tell these students, in all seriousness: You indeed do want to be better than me [sic].

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The Insult-an-English-Teacher post

Illustration accompanying instructions (mercifully placed below the fold) on how to hold the body when preparing to deliver a speech, from The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant (1802), by John Hamilton Moore.

Perhaps it's the fact that, aside from whatever task I assign myself, pretty much every day this summer will feel like Saturday. Perhaps it's the fact that I've been known to engage in a bit of self-deprecation from time to time. But today seems like a good day for a bit of fun at the expense of my profession

This morning, via Acephalous, I read most of the extraordinarily-long comment thread for this thread, and somewhere in there the fellow responsible for a large portion of the witty repartee contained therein lets fly at Acephalous with this:

"Yr. another comma-correcting fraud on the state dole."

Not that I recommend it (unless you have far more time than even I do), but if you were to read that whole thread, you'd learn that apparently this fellow met with some vague academic misfortune while in grad school and now has it out for those engaged in advanced studies in the humanities, just, you know, in general. But never mind that. That particular line struck me not as offensive but as so hyperbolic as to be funny.

Another line that strikes a bit closer, though, because of the immense respect I hold for him, is this little quip attributed to Cormac McCarthy (though I haven't been able to find its source):

"He may be dead; or he may be teaching English."

Note, though: it didn't strike so close that it kept me from posting it on my office door at my previous institution. And now that I have an actual office at my present place of employ . . .

Anyway, here's an invitation to you to post examples of the genre of insults hurled at English teachers here in the comments section, either those of your own invention or read or overheard or read elsewhere. If you need inspiration, just go below the fold and imagine yourself a student of a disciple of Mr. Moore's. That should do it.

What follows, as well as instructions on how to position and pivot on the toes (but not the heels) as you deliver said speech, is from the chapter in Moore's book entitled "Elements of Gesture":

The first plate represents the attitude in which a boy should always place himself when he begins to speak. He should rest the whole weight of his body on the right leg; the other, just touching the ground, at the distance at which it would naturally fall, if lifted up to shew that the body does not bear upon it. The knees should be strait and braced, and the body, though perfectly strait, not perpendicular, but inclining as far to the right as a firm position on the right leg will permit. The right arm must then be held out with the palm open, the fingers straight and close, the thumb almost as distant from them as it will go, and the flat of the hand neither horizontal nor vertical, but exactly between both. The position of the arm perhaps will be best described by supposing an oblong hollow square, formed by the measure of four arms, as in plate the first, where the arm in its true position forms the diagonal of such an imaginary figure. So that, if lines were drawn at right angles from the shoulder, extending downwards, forwards, and sideways, the arm will form a& angle of forty-five degrees every way. When the pupil has pronounced one sentence in the position thus described, the hand, as if lifeless, must drop down to the side, the very moment the last accepted word is pronounced; and the body, without altering the place of the feet, poise itself on the left leg, while the left hand rises itself into exactly the same position as the right was before, and continues in this position till tine end of the next sentence, when it drops down on the side, as if dead; and the body poizing itself on the right leg as before, continues with the right arm extended, till the end of the succeeding sentence, and so on from right to left, and from left to right alternately, till the speech is ended.

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