A Little Venting Can't Hurt

"The personal nature of the learning process places a decided responsibility on the teacher" (p. 235)

Do you remember your worst class as a student? After reading Rosenblatt, I could not help but be reminded of mine. Even though I have a BA in English from A&M, hands down, the worst class in the history of my academic life (maybe in the history of all academia) was my British Literature Survey course. Just thinking about it makes my skin prickle a bit as I reluctantly recall the vision of Dr. Johnson standing behind his podium as he methodically trudged through the muck and mire of the Romantic Poets with the emotional intensity of a 2X4. In terms of personality, the man would make Al Gore look like RuPaul. Concrete image: Think Ben Stien in Ferris Buller 10X. Okay, so you get the picture. Bad. . .very, very bad. During his lectures, he would disseminate HIS understanding of the literature in perfect monotone into a microphone that he wore around his neck. Perhaps I'm being too harsh because the class had over eighty students. But good grief, 78 of them were snoozing within five minutes. Suffer from insomnia? We have found the cure. We were never engaged in any discussion, nor were we given the opportunity to express our opinions. We were there to be talked to and to cover the content. The assessments were matching-quizzes which tested our ability to recall factual information in order to prove that we had read the assigned readings. I never truly engaged with the readings like Rosenblatt so eloquently discusses in her book. I merely attempted to prove to the professor that I had read the material and was prepared to perform well on the quiz.

I don't know how Dr. Johnson would have been able to reconcile these issues, however. I'm sure he was a nice man, but perhaps I am indeed being to harsh. How does one hold a organic, authentic discussion of literature with 80+ students? On second thought, I'm not going to let him off the hook so easily. I admit that he was operating from a different pedagogical tradition, but he let us down. If I am able to provide a space for my middle school students to engage in authentic and meaningful transactional experiences with texts, Dr. Johnson should have been able to foster this type of environment in a college classroom. Our responsibility as educators is not to hide behind podiums and preconceived notions of truth but to be "real" with our students and engage them in relevant, meaningful experiences.

Okay, I've gotten off my soapbox, and I'm counting to ten while taking deep breathes.