Being Uncomfortable

Final exams begin next week, so I’m getting ready for the next round of reading surprising things that my students have learned. One of the things I learned shortly after becoming a college professor twenty years ago was that there is a certain sort of black humor that teachers find particularly entertaining. Contributions used to be anonymously tacked onto bulletin boards in faculty break rooms; now, they tend to spread like a virus on Facebook and other social media outlets. For lack of a more genteel title, this sort of humor can be called “Stupid Things My Students Say (and write).” Especially during finals week, teachers love sharing the outrageously awful and pitifully humorous mistakes that students make as they meld various items from lectures and readings over the semester into unique and bizarre new facts. Sometimes such mistakes involve just one wrong word or name, such as when one of my students told me on the midterm exam that a central event in the Epic of Gilgamesh is when

Gilgamesh and Enkidu went on a quest to kill the great monster Hammurabi.

One of the most reliable sources of such humor is when a student innocently creates a wonderful anachronism, such as when one of my colleague’s students suggested that

Agamemnon expected his wife Clytemnestra to act like a good Christian wife, but she didn’t.

And then there are the times that a student, scrambling to fill in the lines of a blue book with words when he or she doesn’t have a clue about what to write, just makes shit up, as in these responses reported  by a colleague to a prompt on the final exam to summarize what Aristotle has to say about happiness:

People attain happiness through being happy – overall, it is not the wealth or pleasure or power, it is the state at which they are happy to achieve happiness.

or

Aristotle believed that in order for humans to achieve happiness, he or she must practice happiness in order to achieve happiness.

As a Facebook commenter exclaimed, “Holy tautology, Batman!” But as a matter of fact, after many years of introducing students to Aristotle’s ethics, that last one isn’t bad . . .

Then there is a related game that professors play called “Things My Students Say Trying to Get Their Grade Changed.” This one isn’t so much funny as just disheartening—teachers share these stories and chuckle about them because if we didn’t we would bang our heads on our desks in frustration. The latest came yesterday on a Facebook post from a colleague reporting that she just received an email from a student who says that she “is uncomfortable with the idea of receiving a C.” I must admit that I have received very few emails or communications of this sort over the years from my students. That’s probably because I often include the following story from my favorite professor during my Master’s program. Dr. H said that when he was a young and clueless undergraduate, he once received a “C” on a paper. Armed with all of his best arguments as to why this grade was a gross injustice, he marched to the offending professor’s office to make his case for a higher grade. Before Dr. H even opened his mouth, his professor snatched the paper out of his hand, crossed out the “C” with a red magic marker, replaced it with a “D”, and as he handed the paper back asked “Would you care to try for an ‘F’?” Perhaps it is when my students realize that I think this story is sort of cool that they decide not to challenge a grade in this class.

When my colleague reported that her student was uncomfortable with the grade she had earned, I was reminded of a text I had not thought of for a long time. In her powerful and moving memoir Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain gets to the heart and truth of the learning process more directly than any author I am aware of:

There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think–which is fundamentally a moral problem–must be awakened before learning can occur. Most people wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process.

This insight, along with Simone Weil’s observation that

The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade

has been the basis of my “teaching philosophy” for many years. I often tell my students early in the semester that I consider each new class to be like a rubber band. My job is to see how far I can stretch the rubber band before it snaps.

Around this time last year I held eleven one-hour oral final exams with the juniors and seniors who were part of my honors colloquium entitled “Beauty and Violence” this last semester. I’ve been teaching for over twenty years, and I cannot recall a class in which the students worked harder, struggled more mightily with new and challenging ideas, and embraced being uncomfortable more than in this one. The issues at hand were of the highest stakes imaginable—it is possible to have an honest faith in the middle of world that challenges just about every one of the traditional ideas we have inherited about God?—and students expressed frequently in class, in writing and on-line just how paradigm-shattering yet strangely attractive the semester’s work was. During her oral exam, one of my students simply said “This class really messed me up—in a good way!” I told Jeanne that evening that this phrase would be a part of all of my course syllabi from now on. Each syllabus used to say “My job is not to tell you what to think. My job is to get you to think.” Now it will simply say “My job is to mess you up—in a good way.”  Did I ever mention that I have the greatest job in the world?