Friday, May 16, 2008
Returning to the philosophy class that I had canceled, I wasn't sure who or what I would find.
Oct 29, 1999 | For the benefit of the uninitiated, I teach five classes, two each in introduction to philosophy and humanities respectively and one in world religion and spirituality. Community college teaching is extremely demanding, with roughly the same course load as high school and somewhat the same academic expectations as the university: the best and worst of both worlds. Besides, anyone can get in, so classes contain the full range of human ability and motivation, with any given class potentially containing a budding Sartre, a future farmer and a bum well on the road to ruin. My troubled philosophy class is just one of five, the others all bumping along in well-modulated regularity. But as anyone who has ever taught knows, we devote enormous energy to the malignancies and hope that everything else doesn't collapse.
I walked to my afternoon philosophy class in a mood that alternated between the fear of a soldier on the Bataan Death March and the insouciance of a lifeguard at Venice Beach. Anything could happen. They all could have dropped the class in irritation at my apocalyptic gesture that ended the class the previous week; they could be waiting in tense expectation of what the madman would do next; or, perhaps even worse than either of those alternatives, they could be slouching in postures of boredom and decadence, waiting for another irrelevance to intrude on their more pressing agendas.
Most of them were there, including the young fundamentalist Karl, surprisingly, and the cynic Roberta, the two most unlikely returnees, after they had clashed over their differing Christian worldviews. I smiled my usual greeting at Bart, the handsome, gray-haired Christian, shook Leslie's and Tina's hands, and tapped Neil lightly on the back before pulling the text and a sheaf of papers out of my backpack. They quieted down more quickly than before, like the audience in the courtroom of a noteworthy judge. But also like a courtroom, the atmosphere was slightly uncomfortable, as if nobody would have been there had somebody not done something wrong. Even Karl wasn't slouching today, looking like he was afraid I might pull a gun.
There was a time in my career when I had little interaction with students. I simply pontificated, passing down the received wisdom of the ages. The history of philosophy is full of this -- men laying down some line of analysis and then departing, never waiting to hear the reaction. Socrates was actually quite unusual in his insistence on dialogue. Traditionally, students passively read all the stuff and then regurgitated it to their professors on tests, what radical pedagogist Paolo Freire calls the "banking" system of education, teachers making "deposits" and then "withdrawing" the information.
I remember that kind of education well. My philosophy professors dutifully plowed through the canon in old wooden classrooms while we sat in tight rows and copied it all down. The smell of the aging desks is still in my memory. Sure, I learned a lot of information. A stack of notebooks two feet high in the barn attests to the number of "banking" transactions. I had a very positive balance; nobody becomes a teacher without one.
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