A bear and its cubs

At 2:15 p.m., right as the bell ended, the class collectively decided they couldn’t take another minute of her lecture, and stormed out — probably planning the letters they’d write to the department chair.

I admit, I spent some of that afternoon researching the various ways in which tenure can be lost, hoping that there’d be a vacant seat in the history department that would one day be filled with someone who didn’t actually proclaim that the Civil War was caused primarily by changing conceptions of manhood.

It did, however, strike me that I’d have to sign the letter and explain who I was, which would probably lead to the next problem — admitting I’m an undergraduate.

You can write something on expensive paper and sign it with a fountain pen, but if you have to admit that you don’t actually have any credentials on the subject, it’s a fair bet that your letter will be passed around for entertainment value at the next faculty meeting, and that the matter will be quickly dropped. But maybe that’s a good thing — after all, accusing your teachers of being wrong implies more than a little strongly that you already know best.

The bias of instructors comes up as a constant problem among students.
Among the negative comments people leave on Web sites like Ratemyprofessor.com, one of the most damning is “sooooo opinionated!”, assuming the professor has the gall to believe what the reviewer does not.

Most students will say, if you catch them feeling off guard and particularly idealistic, that education is about challenge and growth. And then once they start actually going to classes, what they prize the most is an instructor who can find passionate ways of repeating what everyone always believed to begin with.

Youth is an endless procession of declarative statements, and usually what we declare is the result of what we’ve read that week.

What’s great (and forgivable) about college is how quickly one can go from being a Communist to being a Republican because they flipped through old magazines in the dentist’s office. Being so capricious is at least partly a virtue, but when people become upperclassmen, sometimes they get so caught up in protecting their fragile set of gathered assumptions that they refuse new information on the grounds that it contradicts what they believe for the moment, and cogent worldviews can sometimes be inconvenient to reconstruct.

Introducing new information to an undergraduate on the cusp of escaping from college without an existential crisis is like getting between a bear and its cubs.

Maybe the reason we despise particularly opinionated professors is because, sometimes, we don’t want to be challenged. My history professor may have been reaching, she may have been flat out wrong, but at least she tried to help us.

As for me, if I know one thing, it is that I know nothing. Also, that false modesty is a great way to trick people into respecting what I have to say.