A brief exchange on Facebook a while back (5/27/26) that I think is worth bringing to a wider audience. From Lynne Murphy (University of Brighton, in the UK), testily:
Hey, students who thought they could skip seminars after they “knew” what they were going to write their essay about.
You were wrong, and I’m taking some pleasure in pointing out all the connections you missed between different aspects of our module.
A pleasure I would have been happy to forego if you’d only come to class …
My follow-up (from teaching at UIUC, Ohio State, and Stanford):
It’s truly maddening. Aside from the students who smugly feel entitled, there’s the great population of them who’ve been brought to think — and this is mostly not their fault — that schooling is merely a ritual of jumping through pointless hoops and showing that you can reproduce the right answers to inscrutable questions.
Our students are people who’ve never been told that their teachers intend (with a certain degree of urgency, because we have them for only a brief period of time) to change the way they think and live, in the belief that these changes will be both of practical use to them and beneficial to their lives in our society. The changes might have to be small and incremental, but this is what we’re here for, and we care about it deeply.
Now (8/26) I add commentary:
Not everyone, of course. But at some point early on in courses, I’ll explain that I’m going to be telling them that a lot of what they have been taught about language (or whatever) is significantly wrong — really it’s bullshit, but I don’t say that — and I’m here to adjust things in the direction of truth, and that they will find this unpleasant, but the truth is a great deal more interesting, even more fun, than the school lore. So stick with me for a while.
This is the cards-on-the-table moment. It doesn’t always take, and a few students will accuse me of trying to indoctrinate them, but it works often enough to make the exercise worthwhile. And it can set off some lively and useful class discussion.
A contrast. Most of the caregivers I’ve worked with come from Latin America, and almost every one of them has a college degree, sometimes a master’s. Usually in a technical subject, like software engineering, or in business. They all want to improve their English, so of course they ask the linguistics professor for help. Or just launch, on day 1, into some (often aggrieved) puzzle about why English works the way it does; Spanish, Portuguese, whatever, it makes more sense. Eventually we will unearth questions about almost everything around us, especially the plants (which I am forever commenting on).
There are a lot of things about Spanish that I have steadfastly neglected to learn. So that I have to ask a caregiver to explain it to me, and we will then be engaged in a fair and respectful exchange. (I am also not particularly adept at language learning, preferring instead to seek out patterns of structure. This despite spending my adult life surrounded by remarkable multilinguals, including both my partners in life.)
The thing is, they are intelligent adults, we have come to trust one another, they realize fully that there are useful things they don’t know, and they’re intellectually curious. Wow. You don’t get many classes like that.
I do have to ask them not to let me just fall into lecture mode. Too Much Professor. What we need is give-and-take, not a bravura performance by me.
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