A Metaphor for this Semester

Where did my daily writing habit go? It would be easy to say it went away when teaching began, but that trope is worn out. Everyone says this. It’s not really true. There are choices we make. Still, it makes me feel a little down on myself.

I’ve been teaching a lot, and wondering about the state of the university. I’m not alone. Everyone is wondering about the state of the university. On one of the first days back on campus I captured this image of the university at the university.

Halfway through the term I am confronted again with the feeling that all my efforts are not really doing much to counter this model of higher education, where the perfect form of exchange is missing the entire reason why the machine exists in the first place.

I could take a lesson here from Ralph Ellison. I should realize that the vending machine metaphor is an effect of industrial, capital America and abandon that when thinking about the role of rhetoric.

One cannot rely on a comfortable metaphor of transaction when writing or composing or preparing rhetoric for an audience. The comfort kills the effort. Instead we must think about the exchange over the result. Or the process, if we can think about it outside of a “who gets what” set of terms.

Imagination is not something that is encouraged in the official channels of higher education. There’s little to no imagination; there are demands at every level. Assess. Declare a major. Take the courses in sequence. Check your credits. Apply for a degree. Show up on time. Put your phone away. Read the powerpoint off the screen. This is education; this is learning.

The only space for imagination happens haphazardly, accidentally, and in the spaces where faculty and students find the “artificial gravity” of the university lacking or perhaps malfunctioning.

The malfunction is a mechanical problem, a problem in a life organized by machines and people, but more the machinery set in motion by people. We might think of it as mistakes, were it not so loaded with negativity, as it has been since industrialization (and well into the world of the algorithm).

The university: put in your money and watch the plastic corkscrew spin. There’s nothing in there – not even any chips to get stuck. There’s no place to locate frustration even. You know what you are getting when you pay. The university is out of everything, including the Cheeze Its.

What do we have? A bunch of people in a semi-residential space who interact regularly as they exercise some agency going to class, or not, the library, the dining call, the student center. This seems like a resource to me. It seems less accidental than the classroom sometimes. It seems like the place where I remember student interaction the most, where I’m totally not prepared (or am I?) for teaching, but where a lot of teaching can happen.

Trying to use the classroom as this kind of space fails right away because the students are so well trained by their bad teachers and professors that this is a place of supplication, of reception, no opinions are really taken seriously here, and if there is critical thinking to do it consists of trying to figure out what the professor “really wants” you to do to get an A – and how to short circuit that machine to deliver it for very little effort. Like a vending machine, there are ways to get it to drop two bags of chips for the price of one, or less, if it were stocked of course.

Back to the idea of feeling blue, or funky – last fall I was teaching so much and to be honest, I was much happier than I am this semester. But is that really true? I think last fall I didn’t have time to feel much. I was always “in it.” I was grading, listening, teaching, or prepping. There was no time to reflect on what I was doing because I was doing it.

This is a good lesson to faculty who, in a panic over their own teacher identity, assign a ton of small things to students to do in order to grade them. Discussion board posts, quizzes, reading reactions – the list goes on. There’s no time for students to judge and reflect if they are always “in it.” This sparks a particular attitude and discourse from students about college that is comfortable, but perhaps not very educational or productive. They might love being on top of the work, or they might think college is a sham. But whatever discourse they adopt, they are not really reflecting on anything except the machinery of college. Where is the time and the place for them to reflect on the subject matter, the course as such?

I didn’t have much time to do it, and now I do, and I’m filled with wonder and uncertainty. This feels like a first step. What am I to do with my uncertainty? Perhaps this question is too scary for the university classroom or for faculty.

My thousand-word habit is best conceived of as a mistake, a malfunction, a place where gravity and other basic laws are challenged or simply don’t work, it is a necessary energy-producing activity that allows imagination to pierce through into the route classroom, the place where discipline and obedience are the only things thought about to get the grade. Although there’s no direct line, me sitting here at my keyboard, imagining you, imagining a lot of you, does a lot for me and my ability to think and consider others than it does for you. Perhaps you can think of a response to these writings and it does that for you as you imagine me, lots of people similar to me, and you think about what words would reach us (me). perhaps we need to structure our daily teaching and learning lives around the provision of texts that demand more than a mechanistic response; reconsider discipline as the act of thinking about others rather than doing what we imagine power wants us to do (professors being the worst offenders of this, and passing that bad habit off as ‘“being educated”).