Flummoxed

The classroom is where what a teacher has is fit to what a student needs. Normally, that's not problematic but it can be an occasion of confusion and frustration. Viig and I had ended two classes staring at each other, red-faced. (My face felt flushed.) It's not that I couldn't teach, nor that he couldn't learn but that we couldn't agree on what he wanted to and needed to learn. In my typical long-winded fashion, I began with conceptual frameworks intending to end at specific instances. After I got to the point most useful and, to me, most interesting, he, jovial yet very serious, looked at me baffled and said "Yes...?" as if what's the point of keeping rabbits in a top hat anyway? Rabbits are obvious and ordinary; what he really needed was... And that was over and over.

Here I was flummoxed. If he already knew it all--and I was skeptical--what then? Details, it seems; enough detailed and practical instruction to allow him to avoid his more habitual errors. (I think that was it.) This meant lots of ad hoc lessons to clarify and fix particular grammar problems without ever resorting to generalizations. It's like making sure I avoid giving an overview of the Boston T while making sure enough information is provided to get of reliably at the Malden station, say, any time he rode the Orange line. I'm sure I'm mis-characterizing his concern, but I didn't really understand his problem; nor, I'm sure, did he understand mine.

In my teaching career I'd run into this before, sometimes with individual students and sometimes classes. I've lost jobs over the more intractable incomprehensions. Big hit to the ego each time, not least because I couldn't see clearly where I went wrong. I felt sometimes on these occasions that I had been blind to key cultural assumption systems, and that my feeling of belonging was an illusion, the ground-shaking realization that I was, in fact, a stranger. I thought I knew but I was deceived. (Coming to these shores as a boy may have contributed to my sensitivity to this feeling.)

I remember one class and one student in particular with whom I could not make contact. My goals and hers for our time together were world apart. All the engaged students I could point to in the class meant nothing to either of us face to face. It was humiliating. I'm not talking about difficult to manage students; what I mean is a failure to find a common language, and with Viig, that language wasn't English because we used English freely in a half-hour of intense discussion about the impasse.

If anything speaks of pure otherness, it is a situation like that. Couples in the middle of an argument; national leaders in the middle of a crisis, parents with a squalling child, politicians facing crowds in the city center sometimes feel this sinking of confidence in the possibility of any communication at all. Where ever can minds meet? Can they ever? Encounters run this risk, not just of failure, but of loss of faith in the possibility, even with well-wishing participants, of really making contact.

We tried again.