The Teacher as Compassionate Curmudgeon

In 2010, I attended the Teach For America summit in Washington, D.C. and attended a panel on education reform featuring several high-profile pundits and journalists. James Carville, who animated the panel with his typical Louisiana style, discussed another panel on which he participated. With his penchant for folksy anecdotes, he concluded the story: “The woman asked me, ‘Is the problem with education ignorance or apathy?’ And I said, you know, I don’t know and I don’t give a damn.” His reaction gets to the heart of the excuses and explanations teachers commonly give for their students. Do our students lack the knowledge? Do they lack the passion? Do they lack the skill? Ultimately, if the students are not meeting their potential, does it matter?

To the extent that it aids the teacher in adjusting course, these questions do matter. Yet pedagogically, the answers will always be the same. In Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, I encountered children with tremendous eagerness to learn encumbered by circumstances beyond their control. And at the University of Maryland-College Park, I have encountered some students of the opposite mold: given every opportunity to learn, but stifled by their own refusal to seize this fortune. (These students are few and far between, though. Most of my students are wonderful.) Whether the challenge before me is ignorance or apathy, the way I confront the problem moving forward must be the same. With this context set, I present my teaching philosophy.

The Teacher as Compassionate Curmudgeon

On the eve of persuasive speeches, abruptly every student succumbs to illness, family tragedy, oversleeping, and a litany of other traumas. One cannot walk far down the graduate student hallway in December without hearing an instructor kvetch about their student’s latest grade complaint. It is easy to descend into undergraduate-bashing. I have been culpable in this before: hence my old adage: “All freshmen are sociopaths—they literally cannot grasp a world outside themselves.” Saying these things makes us feel better about the tribulations we encounter every day. It reminds us of the universal truth: that we do not struggle alone in the educational endeavor; that the challenges we encounter are not our fault, but systemic, endemic, cultural, political. The system is broken; undergraduates have been conditioned their entire lives to passively receive knowledge; the culture surrounding college deemphasizes learning; the politics of education stress corporatism over the civic. These are truths, and we confront them daily.

Most teachers toughen up after a semester, goaded by the simple recognition that no one does their students a service by coddling them. This choice makes the instructor’s life easier. When students know they cannot get away with minor deadline shifts or tardiness, the role of educator is simpler. We do it for them; more importantly, we do it for our own sanity. When mercifulness is warranted, mercifulness must be granted; but those circumstances become seldom. We retreat to our research, enamored with the potential it offers. We find the intellectual stimulation from our peers and professors that our students cannot offer, and would not care to offer if they could. Teaching becomes a chore, the bureaucratic obligation, the side-responsibility that gets in the way of what we really want to do.

Teachers quickly undergo metamorphosis into curmudgeons. Cynical, testy, and sarcastic, the teacher develops a shell of protection from student ignorance and error. The teacher adopts an attitude of tragedy, of the inane fallibility of all efforts to inspire. The alternative—entering the classroom every day and attempting to inspire through sheer joy and enthusiasm—becomes exhausting and unsustainable. Curmudgeons survive and the optimists die.

But there is another way. A way predicated on Kenneth Burke’s comic frame. A comic attitude sees students as fallible but not vicious; mistaken but not deliberately ignorant. Students deserve charity (because they are all charity-cases; just look at them), but with a degree of critical perspective-giving. I cite David Foster Wallace’s creative writing syllabus from Illinois State University for an example of how this sounds: “English 102 is not just a Find-Out-What-The-Teacher-Thinks-And-Regurgitate-It-Back-at-Him course. It’s not like math or physics—there are no right or wrong answers (though there are interesting versus dull, fertile versus barren, plausible versus whacko answers).” The compassionate curmudgeon teaches through brash, direct, frank honesty, day in and day out. Through wit, through sarcasm, through cracking jokes with a constant smile, through that comic sense of “we’re all in this together, but you know I know you could’ve done better”—that is the balance required to keep a classroom moving.

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen quips that a relationship is like a shark: It has to keep moving or it dies. The same is true of the classroom. This is the problem with the pure curmudgeon yelling, “Get off of my lawn” at every pleading student email. Bitterness generates stagnancy. The classroom ceases to be a classroom. It becomes a Sisyphean hell; every lesson hauls a boulder up a mountain, and every stack of grading drags the boulder back down.

The compassionate curmudgeon avoids this fate because students are in on the joke. Every day, a brash enthusiasm lights up the room, an enthusiasm that conveys: I care deeply about all of this material, and so will you, because it is important, dang it. I am an insane philosopher and I’m dragging you along this ridiculous epistemological path whether you like it or not. The joke is, dear student, that you know you will like going down this path. You will like it because you are in college and you are smart. You are here, at least in some small way, because something in you yearns for something more ambitious than working at Kinkos until you die. You will like it because you grew up arguing with your parents at dinner instead of acquiescing to them. You will like it because several of your high school teachers wrote letters to our University attesting to your intellectual curiosity and dedication.

So, dear student, stop this madness. You know as well as I do that you’re not here to party all the time. You can party without a college degree. As they say in Office Space, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing all day. So snap out of it. You wrote an admissions letter to our program attesting to your dedication to learning and deep desire to grow as a human being. Knock it off with the showing up five minutes late to class. You know and I know that this is not who you are. Now, watch this crazy video and get ready to dehierarchize the deep cultural assumptions embedded within it. Get ready to research a topic of deep importance to you and talk about it to your classmates, because heaven knows you possess curiosity even if you pretend to the contrary.

In short, the compassionate curmudgeon assumes that ignorance and apathy do not exist. The real motivations for an apparent lack of desire to learn are irrelevant, because the students do want to learn. I almost wrote: “They do want to learn, and they forget sometimes.” But they don’t forget. If you ask any student why they are here, even the student that skipped class fourteen times in a row, even the stoned jock who passes out every day, they will give you an academic or professional or intellectual answer every time. So tap into what they already know is true. Be the stern dad who does not let them play video games until the homework is done.

Because they know it is a joke, and the teacher just stopped laughing.