in which i broke a projector screen but something still worked

I’m trying to decide what I would be thinking if I were sitting in my students’ seats, if my smallest undergraduate class looked like twenty-five desks crammed into a tiny room with a bustling, bumbling, lispy, red-faced, twenty-something teacher who confessed on the first day, and even in the same sentence, that she has no teaching experience and she can’t figure out how to get the projector screen up.

Honestly, my students probably don’t know any better, having no grid for a different Comp 1 experience. But since they’re being subjected to something so exceedingly different than my undergraduate experience, where twenty-five was a large class, Comp 1 wasn’t the only first year English option, and professors with PhDs were the norm, I feel slightly appalled and definitely terrified that I’m solely responsible for the sea of young, bright, half-lidded from boredom or hangovers or lunch-comas eyes that stare back at me. And even more poignant than the horror and terror is the overwhelming sense of honor and responsibility. Two days in, and I’m already proud of them.

I want my students to realize that learning to write is an invaluable skill, not just a check mark in their quest towards a bachelor’s degree. And while I’m not narcissistic enough to think that I can accomplish what English teachers have been trying to instill in students since English teaching began, I do hope that they’ll leave my class with at least the tiniest inkling of just how important writing is.

Beginning the first day of my teaching career with a syllabus review seemed a little ominous and a lot boring, so instead on day one we talked about stereotypes. Without telling them anything about myself, I wrote “Oklahoma” on the board, broke them into groups, and asked them to come up with a list of words that came to mind when they thought of the state. I wanted ridiculous answers, and they didn’t disappoint. Cowboys, sports teams, tornados, corn (“Um, I put corn…but then I realized that might just be Nebraska. Does corn grow in Oklahoma too?”), Oklahoma (“There’s a song or musical about Oklahoma but I can’t remember what it’s called…”), rodeos, Hobby Lobby, Republicans, it all went on the board. By choosing a relatively safe topic in the realm of stereotypes, and with their perfectly ridiculous answers, it was easy to see how dangerously incomplete our “definition” of Oklahoma was; they all knew we couldn’t claim that our words on the board completely defined Oklahoma.

We then extended this discussion by watching a more serious and thought-provoking TEDTalk on the perils of incomplete, or “single story,” definitions. Ultimately, I attempted to communicate, through Adichie’s talk and through discussion that followed, that writing and reading are tools for combatting stereotypes, or, in other words, that writing well allows us to articulate for ourselves the truths that we want others to know, and by reading others’ stories we gain new insight into their truths.

And then, day two happened.

And I’m still confused about day two and how it happened…

I assigned Sam Hamill’s “A Necessity to Speak,” a controversial piece that forces a response from the reader. I picked the piece because their first essay is a reader response essay, an assignment that asks them to analyze a text in light of their own experiences, simultaneously examining 1) textual strategies that elicited emotion from them and 2) personal experiences that shape how they read and respond to the text.

Hamill’s piece is powerful and uncomfortable, identifying “battered” populations and asking readers to sympathize with both the battered and the batterer. Hamill himself was an orphan, a victim of abuse, and then an ex-marine, so his stance, one of eager empathy to the batterer, is a confession of sorts, a testament to the dangers of silence. He condemns society’s collective silence and holds us all responsible for perpetuating violence through a refusal to acknowledge the painful realities of the battered, who then, he proposes, become the batterers. Or, one could argue, he sees the batterer as battered by society. Additionally intriguing is his form, which is choppy and disorganized, with large chunks of jarringly ugly prose.

Basically, Hamill’s piece is too complex to assign on the second day of their learning and my teaching, and I left the lesson feeling like I had not taught it well. Nothing went terribly wrong, aside from the projector screen that I had definitely broken at this point, rendering half of the whiteboard useless and blocking the other half of the whiteboard from the view of a third of the class; we had good discussions about form and thesis and strategies and effect, even taking some time to compare Hamill’s piece to Clint Smith’s spoken word poem, but I just wasn’t sure that they got it.

And then I read their journal responses.

And they were so good. I mean, gramatically and structurally, they were pretty terrible. But I loved the level to which they engaged with the text. (These responses may or may not have made me cry…)

And I’m still not sure they get it, if the it is some nugget of profundity that leads to a perfect reader response essay. But they certainly got something.

One student opened up about a recent rape experience and the silence of a mother. One student discussed the inability to speak honestly to parents too concerned with ultra conservative ideology. One student communicated anxiety about revealing homosexuality. One student brought up the cyclical nature of bullying. One student revealed anger at never feeling well-spoken or taken seriously. And each student had a similar story; each student identified an emotion that the text made him or her feel and then related that emotion to a personal experience. I mean, yes, the ability to identify and incorporate textual evidence needs work, but this is a start!

My students are so brave! And, even though there is so much work to do, even though they need to focus their writing and learn about good transitions and gain a vocabulary for textual analysis, even though there were grammar mistakes out the wahzoo, and even though it’s my job to teach them all of that and sixteen weeks sounds impossibly short, I’m so, so thrilled that many of them saw the journal as a safe place for self expression.

Now, if only I could learn their names…..