My Last Ever Class: Summer Literature, 2014
by Martha Kennedy
My last ever class (after 35 happy years in the classroom) was a summer lit class, meaning that in a mere 6 weeks I was to cover everything covered in a regular semester. Students enrolled because it was an easy way out of an onerous requirement. My students were mostly second semester college sophomores, but some were university students getting a basic ed requirement out of the way. I’d taught this before, loved it before, but that was 2002, longer ago than I realized. Writing was my thing; literature was a cherry on the sundae of a career I loved.
The college was encouraging us to teach about WW I during this, the 100th anniversary of the “Great War to End All Wars.” I was very happy to oblige; having a theme around which to organize the sometimes random bits of an Intro. to Lit class was helpful and, I thought, could make the class more interesting and the literature more relevant. For the novel, we were reading The Sun Also Rises. This proved to be an all but impossible task. It should not have been. It’s an easy novel and a short one. The historical background is accessible and I was providing it.
In this class I learned that it was time I put myself in a nice Pyrex container (the kind that was around when I was a sprout) and hie myself hither to yon greener pastures because my day was done… Here are snippets of conversations coming out of group work on the day of my epiphany.
- “I didn’t bring my book.”
“How are you going to answer the questions?”
“Did you ever hear of ‘Google’?”
I shudder inwardly. This is the kid who thought Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants” was “The Hills HAVE White Elephants,” conflating Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King. “Good luck with that,” I say. “I made up these questions. They’re not posted anywhere online.” YET, I think to myself, knowing of “Yahoo answers…” - “Professor, how come you didn’t tell us you changed the time for the homework to be turned in?” (It’s turned in online, usually 10 pm on Sundays. I gave them extra time until noon today, Monday.)
“I did.”
“Well I didn’t know.”
“I told the class. AND I sent you an email.”
“Yeah, well I was in Mexico City.”
“That’s not my problem,” I say, actually astonished to hear myself. “You had a week + 14 hours to get around to it. My giving you more time shouldn’t affect your ability to do your homework. Not in an adverse way.” - Dark haired, dark eyed student — other students assume he’s Mexican. Many of my students in California were Mexican — a fact that made me like my job more. I like the culture and the people and I felt at home with them. But guess what? He’s this thing called “white.” “I’m Greek,” he said to me and his partner.
“Where are you from?” asks the partner.
“Here. My parents are from Greece.”
“What do they speak there?” asks the partner.
“Greek!” I say, astonished by the question.
“Greek is a dead language. What do they speak there NOW?”
“Seriously?” I’m flabbergasted. “They speak Greek. Modern Greek.”
“Is that true?” he asks the Greek/American student.
Yeah just DON’T believe your teacher… What have past teachers done that this one — I! — have inherited so little credibility?
The Greek kid says, “Yeah, but they use symbols to write. Not letters.”
“Those are letters. It’s just a different alphabet. We have some of the same letters,” I explain.
“Yeah, but they’re like ‘sigma’ and ‘beta’ and stuff, not like ‘es’ and ‘bee’. The symbols mean something.”
I ponder my odds at spontaneous self-combustion, then, “They’re symbols to US because we USE them that way. In themselves, they are letters in an alphabet. They spell words. OK, guys, work. We have to make some sense out of this book, OK?”
The Greek kid goes to Google translate and types in “work” in English and asks for a translation to Greek. “Can you read that, Martha?”
“Yeah, εργασία — ergasia.”
“No way. Tell it to pronounce it,” demands the kid for whom Greek is a dead language, “it” being the computer which is more reliable than I am. The Greek kid hit the speaker, “Ergasia.”
“She was right!” Utter amazement.
“It’s the word from which we get words like ‘ergonomics’. You know that word, right?” I explain, a being of surprising — but not infinite — patience.
“Yeah. How do you know this stuff?”
“I studied Greek,” I said. “When I was your age, I thought educated people should know classical languages. I studied Homeric Greek for two years and Attic, well, only a semester.”
“Why?”
“I just told you.”
“Yeah, but why?”
No…it’s not a goal here, simply to be well educated. It has no currency. Well, maybe it never did. Or maybe it does and these guys haven’t had the chance? I don’t know, but they’re all over 20, some are university students. For the past six weeks I’ve been shaken by the depth of their ignorance. They’re smart enough, but untaught. Yeah, I’m a teacher, but… - “So during prohibition, people in Spain couldn’t drink?”
“No. Only the United States had laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol,” I answer.
“So only rich people could drink.”
“No one was supposed to, but anyone could buy booze at a speakeasy if they had the money to buy it. That’s what’s going on in this conversation between Jake and the ‘wine bottle Basque’.”
“Only rich people, then.”
“Anyone who was willing to risk it could drink,” I said, “ very motivated people. You didn’t have to be rich. A lot of people made their own booze. You know Al Capone, right?”
“Yeah, like The Untouchables.”
“Yeah.” A point of contact!
“They made their own booze?”
“Yeah, and smuggled it, like the Mexican drug cartels. It was similar.”
“How did they make booze?”
“That would be a cool thing for you to research, right? People have made alcohol to drink for thousands of years.”
“No way. I’m going to ‘Google’ that. That can’t be right.” - “Why are you making us learn about WW I? It’s boring.”
“BORING?”
“Yeah. Really boring. And depressing. I don’t want to read about people dying and stuff. It’s boring. What’s the point? Just because YOU’RE interested?”
I think for a moment. Should I engage? Should I explain that the college has decided to make WW I a theme for the next few years? Should I explain that of all 20th century events, WW I might have influenced the modern world the most? Should I explain that learning about the mistakes of the past helps us prevent them in the future? Should I say ANYTHING? I decide not to. I am not taking any bait and I am not justifying anything. “Fuck you,” I think as I walk away.
Nothing I’ve done for the previous five weeks has worked with the majority of my students. Still, three out of 25 are truly interested, responsive and productive. Their abilities to read literature developed rapidly and their enthusiasm is clear. I thought for a moment of a grad school seminar I’d been in when only two of us were at all engaged, and my prof explained that when I became a teacher I should be happy to reach two out of 20. OK, but I’m not happy. I’ve always done much better than that. This summer lit class is a failure. I no longer respect most of the people in my classroom; in fact, I actively dislike them. With that being the case, I have no right even to BE in that classroom.
On my long drive home, I make a monumental and life changing decision. I am sixty-two. I can retire. I see that I will not live long in the future my students will own. I decide not to spend any more time or heart dragging that future back to the residue of an era rapidly fading in the cheap dazzling glitter of the binarian dust. No way Jose or Dimitri or Κουνούπι or Yakob or Tiffany or whatever. I cannot stem the tide. “Four more days,” I think. “just something to get through. Gotta’ get a’hold of Stand and Deliver.”
