Up at the front of the room, sitting impressively before the grimy blackboard, a severe young woman goes through the motions, attempting stubbornly to extract from us answers to the banal questions she repeats over and over in the dead air of the ro
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| Andrew Mortensen Big Ideas (Don't Get Any) |
By the pedagogical reasoning of the University, we gather weekly in this room to enhance our understanding of material presented in lecture. Here, theoretically, we are gaining a firmer grasp of crucial course concepts, hashing and rehashing overarching themes, themes which will reshape the very way we look at life. Theoretically.
"Discussion," these impotent gatherings are named; but a discussion by definition demands a constant flow of speech. And here we have no speech, no sound but the toneless drone of the GSI. My eyes begin to cross and the GSI asks again: "How many people have heard of the Civil War?" A light, almost imperceptible shudder passes through each person in the room. In some, as in me, this shudder is a feeble response to the idiocy of the question; in others, who wouldn't know the Civil War from cat litter, the shudder is nothing more than an unconscious protest against the ridiculously low temperature of the room. The GSI misinterprets the shudder as a show of enthusiasm and decides to risk another question.
"Does anyone have any reactions to yesterday's lecture?" she asks, smiling brightly at each person in the room. One girl, evidently on speed and possibly missing large sectors of her frontal lobe, throws her hand in the air, waving it until at last the GSI says through smiling lips the girl's name, whereupon the girl exclaims, "What's up with that Buddhism thing? Is that strange or what?" The GSI, who is a patient, if somewhat dull person, points out gently that nothing in the lecture yesterday was related to Buddhism, and in fact nothing in lecture will ever be related to Buddhism. The mention of Buddhism arouses smaller intellects in the room: slow gears begin revolving, faulty wires begin to spark, and after the passage of long seconds, the misfiring vehicles of their minds cough to life. One young man blurts out, "Once I read some of the Tao Te Ching," to which the girl sitting next to him responds with "Isn't that some weird poetry or something?" Admiring eyes turn to consider the source of this singular insight, and modestly she adds, ducking her head, "I like to read."
I panic, and over every inch of my body the dreadful heat of adrenaline spreads. Not 15 minutes of the hour I must spend here have passed.
The GSI seizes on the elements of the previous comments which, by tortuous convolutions, may be applied to this particular course, a literature survey. "Okay, good!" she says, scrawling on the pad of paper she keeps close at hand. She continues: "Okay, I think we should try to focus real close now and take a good hard look at the text itself. Has anyone noticed anything about this book that they thought was interesting?" The energy level in the room increases slightly, and another young man, thoroughly unaware of his own relative unimportance, puts his hand in the air, waits impatiently until he is called on, and states, "Well, for me, I mean, I do a lot of reading, because I'm Pre-Law I mean, and so when I read something I look for like, you know, the paradigmatic aspects (paradigm means, like, the sort of like, well, you know). And so it was weird because this one character just doesn't fit the paradigm of a woman. Where was it, it was in one part, this character, she's like doing some really weird stuff."
On the heels of this outburst follows the reedy voice of a nondescript woman, saying, "Um, I'm in the B-school, and I'm really only taking this class because I need it to fulfill one of my requirements" (sleepy heads nod in sympathy) "but I just wanted to say: What the hell does this guy think he's writing? Like in conversation, I mean that's just unbelievable, because no one talks that way in real life. I mean, how often do people actually use the word 'coherent'?"
Struggling to keep my head above the raging floodwaters of her incoherency, I feel my cheeks sag and grow flabby; I clutch at my ear purposelessly; I let my lips slacken and through them I exhale.
"That's a very good point," the GSI says. "What can we say about the language in this book? Does it make it obsolete? Can it still be read today as a work of literature or is it now just a quaint part of literary history?" The question catches the class off-guard, and momentarily the dead silence is resurrected; but fortunately someone is up to the challenge: "I don't know about that," a stout guy sitting next to me says with full obnoxious voice, "but ,God this is one long book!" People laugh at this insipid comment, and he adds, "I mean, this thing is more than two 200 pages or something!" More laughter; he raises his book in the air with an expression of disbelief on his face, in the process knocking his appallingly dirty hat to the floor. It lands in a puddle of spilled Coke and starts to soak it up. The stout man stoops down, picks up his sopping hat, and replaces it on his head.
"Well," says the GSI as people begin shutting notebooks and folders, "we didn't get as much done as I'd hoped we would, so next week be prepared to really dig in!" I collect my things, shrug into my coat, listening with idle ear to some genderless voice remark to a friend that the "heaviosity" of the class is almost overwhelming.
Almost.
- Andrew Mortensen's fantasies are unlikely, but beautiful. admorten@umich.edu
02-04-99
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