Anil's post

Greetings,

I, too, find this medium alienating, so please bear with me. I have decided to blog about an event—one of my more unfortunate experiences while teaching a rhetoric and composition class. This experience, I think, speaks precisely to David’s point about being reluctant to relinquish his authority in the classroom. Anyway, here it is: As I was explaining some basic grammatical concept (predicate nominative)—with Fowler’s Modern English Usage on the table in front of me—I was met with the following comment by a student: “Well, we don’t use it like that in English—I mean, you know, like in America.” After this comment, others chimed in and informed me of scenarios in which people regularly say, “It is me.”

The initial comment, I felt, served to undermine me not on intellectual grounds (which would have been more agreeable) but rather on the grounds (tacit, of course) of an overabundance of pigment. Not being able to be taken seriously, especially when discussing something as elementary and relatively stakes-less as grammar, by a group of eighteen-year olds on such grounds is simply disheartening. (I had a similar moment at the same university with the director of graduate studies, who felt the need to point out to me that in the English language, the word allegory is rather fraught....) Anyway, my point is this: When the deck is already necessarily stacked against you, it seems perhaps too dangerous to budge even just a little. While I didn’t pin my degrees on the board and wear a three-piece suit to class every day, I did, from that point on, make sure to foreground my authority in the classroom. This is where, for instance, I think a dialectical approach could be useful – i.e., understanding the classroom as space that can be transformed by the dynamic between two irreducibly unequal – but, in certain respects, equivalent – forces. Put otherwise, I submit that something productive – perhaps emancipatory – can ensue from the contradiction between a relatively powerless class and a relatively powerful teacher. Maybe.