Adventures with Students, vol. 17

put on your bravest face

Got asked this morning by a student, after I admitted to them that the Darwin reading I'd given them was difficult even for me:  "wait . . . how come you're making us read something that you don't even understand?  How are you going to grade our performance?"

Fair question, though it proceeds from flawed premises.  Let me see if I can work my way toward a satisfactory answer.

First, I think it's a comforting fiction for many students to think that their teachers have mastered all the material they teach.  In the hard sciences, this might even be the case:  there is a certain set of facts and procedures, theories, etc., that represent the requisite material one needs to be able to teach.  In the humanities, however, and especially in the range of readings that one approaches in a composition class, it's a pipe-dream. 

Second, it's worth examining whether or not mastery of an essay is necessary in order to teach it.  I don't hold to that, of course.  I think the more important thing is to have a handle on interpretive strategies, on contextual knowledge, on the workings of rhetoric and philosophy in the general sense.  With those tools, it's possible to approach an enormous range of topics successfully.

Third, education and knowledge isn't the same thing as automatically "knowing" everything about every writer you face--or even understanding everything he or she says. A young person can be idealistic about knowing everything . . . as is the case with so much else, time and life teach otherwise.