I hear you talk about how Professor So and So is great because he never shows up for class, or gives the same final exam every year and you have the answers from your roommate. I’ve heard you tell one another, “Take THIS class because you’ll get an A no matter what.”
I cannot tell you the way that lays me low.
It is hard not to teach that class. Despite the considerable pressure to ask nothing of you, to give you an A no matter what you do, despite the fact it would be easier for me to be popular with students by letting you text through class or sleep in the back or come late or not show up…
I know something you don’t know, and it is this. When I require that you come to class on time, or when I push you beyond where you think you can go, when I learn your name, and plan lessons, and give grades that reflect your work…that is what respect looks like.
I wish that when a teacher of yours cancelled weeks’ worth of classes, instead of feeling elated, you felt as though you’d been slapped in the face. I wish that when you heard that a teacher gave out easy A’s you were furious, and thought, “No way! I want to take a class with someone who doesn’t think I’m disposable.”
I know your lives aren’t easy, that you work two jobs, and take three buses to get here, and that a thousand entities want your attention. I know you are worried about money and people you love, and that the world can seem like it’s full of danger and frailty, and that you don’t know how you’ll pay back your student loans. Plus, you’re worried if your lover really loves you, and whether your nose is too crooked. It’s a wild maze you have to navigate, and I do not take the load that is on your shoulders lightly.
But teachers don’t have it so easy either. In addition to teaching, and the thousand papers to read and grade, and the myriad petty frustrations that go along with teaching, and all of the writing and publishing we’re supposed to do outside of teaching, and the service we do for our departments, we also have bills to pay. We also have people we love and worry about. We have our own crooked noses and disappointed lovers. It would be easier for us too if we didn’t care, if we handed out A’s like M&M’s. It would be easier for us to teach that class that you think you want to take.
But the class you want to take I will not teach.
There are a thousand times a semester when I have to re-choose integrity over complacency. When a student is mad at me because I said “No” to them walking in twenty minutes late with their ear-buds in and interrupting class, or when I work all morning on a lesson plan and not one student has done the reading–in those moments I have to remember my obligation. When a student, at the tail end of the semester slumps in my office, her face bathed in horror as she realizes she has paid for and wasted an entire semester, I have to remind myself that it would be disrespectful if I were to say, “I don’t care that you did nothing, that you learned nothing, that you didn’t show up. I don’t care.”
There is a little compass inside my rib-cage, and it tells me when I am living according to my principles. If that compass is not pointing towards True North at the end of each day, I can’t sleep. I avoid looking at myself in the mirror. I’m ashamed.
I’d rather be unpopular than have that feeling. I refuse to think so little of you that now even YOU ask nothing from yourselves or from us. You have been tricked into thinking that the best way to live is to slide through life invisible, demanding nothing, leaving no mark.
The class you want, you should not take. The next time you sit through a class in the back row texting, or take a class for an easy A, I hope you have a feeling that someone has won, but that that someone is not you. Want to see a revolution? Stop asking for nothing. Stop settling for crumbs. Ask more of yourselves and of the people around you. Populate your world with people who push you, and make sure one of those people is you.
And that class you hope to avoid? Make every class that class. Be alive and engaged wherever you land, and don’t ever be the first one to give up on yourself again.
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N. West Moss has had her work published in The New York Times, Salon, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. Her first book, a collection of short stories set in NYC’s Bryant Park, will be published by Leapfrog Press in 2017. She teaches creative writing.