"Trying to Strike Sparks in Minds that Held No Flint" -- Thomas Wolfe

I wanted to be the kind of teacher I’d always wanted; as I said, I wanted to inspire them. ...

What I didn’t anticipate was the monotony of their academic inquiry: ‘Can I go to the bathroom?’ ‘Do we need our books today?’ ‘Is this gonna be on the test?’

On the first day of class I was telling them about myself – that I liked theatre, that I sometimes reviewed theatre for the local paper – when a hand shot up. The hand twisted in the air, shook with impatience.

‘Do you have a question?’ I finally asked.

‘What’s theatre?’ he asked.

I couldn’t believe it.

‘Duh,’ said the girl beside him. ‘Theatre is live movies.’

In that moment, I realized something crucial: Those kids were so stupid.

...Could anybody be this dumb? After all, I went through college terrified to speak up in group discussions because I thought my opinions about literature and politics didn’t sound as good as everyone else’s. But these kids spoke without a filter, like drunken babies."

As a graduate student at a fairly-large university, I was charged with teaching undergraduate courses in political philosophy to a lot of these drunken babies, a few years removed from her setting. I didn't mind.

For every 10 drunken babies, there was usually 1 genuine student, amounting to 3 to 4 a semester in my classes of 35 - 45, and that was enough for me.

I loved teaching them: I loved guiding them through the difficult passages of the core texts of my discipline, helping them engage the ideas, express their own, and training them in the necessary skills and methods to find the truth as we political theorists saw it. I loved it so much, that dealing with the drunken babies was a minor inconvenience at best.


It's a different experience than what she was going through, teaching at the university level. At the university level, you're not required to teach anyone that doesn't want to be taught. They paid tuition. They can invest in a good education or they can mark time until the keys to the American economy are handed over to them. That few took the path of a good education made me bitter -- like most things -- but it didn't take the joy out of being in the classroom. And it didn't prevent me from nodding and laughing through that essay: I recognized a few of the experiences and sympathized with the others.

Before I left graduate school, I was offered a job teaching in a private school in Northern Virginia, and I passed on it to continue waiting tables. Somehow, I knew it would be totally different from teaching university classes, and I suspected that my head would've been in the oven by fall break. Reading about her experiences, I think I made the right decision.