another down; two to go

Scratch another week off the calendar for this term. I actually have three weeks to go (one after the end of classes for scheduling full-time faculty and being on hand for adjunct contract signing), but only two more with students. I kind of can't believe it.

Nature in Lit? Fuck. One student showed up--late. She's behind on the assigned pages, so I let her spend most of the period reading on her own while I did more annotating in my own text. We did talk a little about the novella at the end of the class, but we got into a discussion of Disney, and children's literature, and literature's function as a way to learn from experiences one has not actually had.... I'm delighted that she's enjoying the novella just as a story. She doesn't have much of substance to say in terms of analysis, but she's caught up in the characters and plot, getting angry with one set of characters, wondering what's going to happen as a consequence of a revelation that has just occurred. Nice. It's so easy when teaching literature to forget to point out that we're reading something that is meant to be enjoyed. Art. Well, some of it is emotionally difficult, so it isn't all "enjoyable," but it's certainly meant to be "appreciated" (a word I struggle with as students use it; I'm not at all persuaded they know what they mean by it). I sometimes remember to point out when something is beautifully written, or powerful--but I don't spend a lot of time explaining why it's beautiful (like explaining a joke: deadly). I just point out that it is beautiful, and hope students "feel" it.

Which leads me to part of yesterday's class that I forgot to discuss in the post. Looking at the introduction to the novel in particular, students were baffled by some of the rather deep (and, to my mind, amusingly expressed) philosophical concepts Le Guin discusses. An example: Le Guin writes, "Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!" Some students--not all--pick up on the fact that fiction is a "pack of lies" because it is invented, not real, not (in one sense) true. But when I ask students the difference between facts and truth, all they can come up with is that truth is opinion. Um, no. Well, yes. But no. I do belong to a school of thought that believes there are truths beyond mere opinion, but--as Le Guin suggests (not so much in the passage I just quoted as elsewhere)--it is difficult to define truth, or express it, or give an example, never mind to explain how something that is not at all real could help us find "truth."

But what struck me is that these students, apparently across the board, have never been called upon to think about what Truth is. Or what truth is. Or how one can lie but tell the truth, why facts are different from truth. Or why "truth is a matter of the imagination" (as Le Guin's protagonist says in the first sentence of the novel). These are young people who have never even glimpsed the deep end, never mind ventured anywhere close to it. I'm deeply concerned about living in the world when they're in charge of it.

It makes me want to appoint myself empress of the universe and completely re-do American education from pre-K on--and tell parents to either get on board or get the hell out of the way.

And yet, there are still young people like the three remaining students in Native American Lit, and not only are they getting into the deep end, they're paddling around in it with enthusiasm. One is even doing some free-diving. It's enormously gratifying. So what makes the difference?

Who knows. But Native American Lit was, as usual, a pleasure, even though we were all pretty crunchy, as in toast. When I see them next, the class will be devoted to on-the-spot feedback on second versions of their papers, so I'm hoping I'll be a great deal more alert than I was today. But between classes, I got the P&B stuff out of my hair (hooray!) and cleared a few other nits off my desk. I fully intended to walk in here after class and go through the remaining chaos on my desk to get things at least semi-organized--but nah. And I'm breathing through the Pavlovian anxiety I feel at the idea of leaving everything on the desk exactly as it is until Monday. I have to be back here tomorrow for a long (loooooong) Assessment symposium (ain't gonna be here when it starts, as I've said: I can't think what would get me to campus at 8 a.m. on a Friday), but the only reason I'll come to the office will be to change into my riding duds so I can head straight from here to horse time. And next week will shake out however it does. Nothing to worry about (unless I find a few pearls that have dropped through the floorboards). I might, maybe, possibly, be in for a relatively easy glide to the end. I'm almost afraid to say so, as it seems whenever I do, I immediately find myself in a mad panic--but what a miracle that would be.