Learning from Undergraduates
Occasionally,
teaching undergraduates involves moments
which provoke you to curse. On the other
hand, learning from undergraduates can be a blessing which demands your
gratitude. The young women and men who
sat in my classrooms from 1970 to 2012 were powerful instructors. They were unpredictable. Some of them were brilliant, challenging me
to challenge them. The so-called average
students inspired me to invent puzzling questions for which we struggled
together to find responses, for the questions defied our best efforts to find
answers. The slower students used their
lack of preparation to teach me why compassion and patience must be used with
caution, why sympathy must not be confused with empathy. In one way or another, all of my students
contributed to my worldly salvation.
None of them are to be blamed for my spiritual flaws, for the faults
that require me to negotiate and renegotiate endlessly with the cosmic powers. For a period of forty-two years,
undergraduates taught me the limits of being human.
They
also taught me why the quest for clarity can be dreadful. Clarity in speech and writing that is (or can
be) free in day to day life is costly inside the boundaries of
institutionalized learning. As teachers try to build knowledge and share insights about what they are
constructing, profound investments in a discipline can encourage blindness.
Some of us who deal with literary theory, critical possibilities, and
interpretation, for example, often
mistake our errors for "truth."
We can easily forget what now
appears to us to be simple was at some point in our life histories daunting and
complex. Our acquired expertise in
language and literature and writing can be diabolic. Our praxis or pedagogy can
be identical with the Devil's work, particularly in instances when we believe
we have to be a god in the eyes of our students and our peers. Abandoning common sense, many of us clothe
ignorance in awkward prose and parade it as evidence of superior achievement. Is it ironic that obstreperous representation of thought earns great praise?
Retired,
liberated from the immediate need to learn from undergraduates or to teach them,
I have not forgot what they taught me. The quest for clarity is still a
dreadful journey toward eternity, and I thank undergraduates for implanting
such knowledge in my mind.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
October 17, 2015
