Teaching. Who’s for Lunch?

Catching and riveting the attention of lethargic smart ass students is the teacher’s challenge. In part showmanship and acting skill, like the thespian securing an audience’s rapt attention by reading the telephone book or reciting the alphabet or a comedian holding a mass of night club drunks with an hour long patter. But the lecturer and those with a didactic or ideological purpose must also convey, sometime in large part, new information. Where the audience is primed, wants the knowledge with a fervor, the message can be straight, dry, dense, technical. Veering off for a gag or a dramatic motion of the head or arm could be an unwelcome detour away from the facts (and only the facts, madame.) It can be like offering a hungry wolf too much razz-ma-tazz and you’re for lunch.

The first task for you the teacher with any and every student, no matter the setting, is to convert him into a large ravenous animal who is convinced that you are carrying the victuals. You’ll know when you succeed by the fear and even terror you feel, hoping you have enough of the right stuff to give. If there is not a clamor, a howl for more; if you are not in a perpetual and drenching sweat, you haven’t stirred them up enough.

Another image: The teacher as prison warden. Students in uniform, hands folded, sitting up straight, absolute quiet. The professor dictates the text which must be memorized. Any deviation, any hint of inattention means a session with the assistant principal for discipline and his low-brow gym instructor associates for a working over. Get it, baby, it’s learn or else.

Then the teacher as a figure of love, adoration, admiration. Garlands of flowers, a light perfume in the air, no sharp lines, everything and everybody shimmering, Debussy’s Clair de Lune a murmur from the wall. Learning as a sweet dream, the classroom as an antechamber to paradise.

Then fun. Learning as party-time. Bongo drums, conga lines. Rhythmical recitation of lessons. The teacher as band leader and lead vocalist. Mathematics and the tango confabulated. Don’t like music. don’t like dance, don ‘t like tempo. Shame on you.

For the lecturer in sociology there is one more option–solving the mystery. Periodically in the popular news an issue will arise that is so entangled with multiple strands of culture and social organization and public opinion that any understanding beyond the morally based visceral seems all but impossible. It is the ultimate challenge in the social studies. The attempted analysis of a complex concrete case. I think of it as the anti-experiment–no observer’s controls, no clarity in detail, built-in contention and disagreement, no room for objectivity. Cases like a famous athlete accused of murdering his ex-wife, or like the disappearance of citizens into seeming private prisons, or like the astonishing claim that twelve million people have illegally entered the U.S. and settled into permanent residence.

If the sociology teacher is so smart, why doesn’t he/she show us a trick. Analyze a real social event, pal. Teach by acting like a detective.