MosesWrites

Class Absent Anxiety

This semester I’m teaching an advanced humanities seminar focused on Spain, on Spanish history and culture from the mid fifteenth century through the present. We will have a travel program to Madrid, Toledo, and parts nearby during the Thanksgiving holiday and I have always wanted to extend and to create greater depth for international programs, beyond the time spent away from campus.

As the semester began, I also realized another, greater goal: to teach a rigorous, inspiring course that obviates anxiety, for students, and for me. Can we learn, can we challenge ourselves, can we have high expectations, can we do all this without creating pressures that undermine those goals? Can we stretch in a way that strengthens, rather than spasms, our intellectual muscles, our interpersonal and emotional dexterity?

I don’t know, but I believe we ought to try.

First things first: everyone has an A. I will not provide any other grades, or graded assessments. Regardless of what a student may or may not do, they’ll get an A on their transcript.

In a world of rampant grade inflation, I’ve no ethical concerns, plus I’m happily declaring it publicly and, instead, if a student wishes to have a thorough, written assessment of their performance, an honest evaluation of their engagement, whether for themselves or for their college applications, I am happy to oblige. So far most of them have been scared to say anything at all, so we’ll need to wait and see.

More so, since everyone has an A, each student needs to choose her or his own adventure, to decide the level of effort, day to day, she or he wishes to make. I’ve stressed too that I don’t want them to falsify or misrepresent any work: if they’ve not done the reading, if they don’t understand something, that’s 100% A-ok because indeed they already have an A.

Let’s be honest.

I want to help them learn, to learn actually, truly, and I can’t do that unless I know what they do and don’t grasp, the extent to which they might comprehend, or how they can analyze and interpret on their own.

I’ve created a pace that’s deliberately slow, selecting demanding materials that reward careful, close reading, and which have had significant impacts in cultural and scholarly conversations. Since early September, I’ve assigned perhaps a total of fifty or sixty pages of reading: we’ve quickly gotten to Columbus’ voyages of discovery, and so I’ve had them read from John Elliott’s essential The Old World and the New; Columbus’ letter of 1493 (his first written report of his voyage); Ilan Stavans and Margaret E Boyle’s Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook; Borges’ short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius;” and Anthony Grafton’s introduction in his New Worlds, Ancient Texts.

Before the Chinese National Days holiday (国庆节), rather than any sort of written assessment, the students in groups of three or four had to cook something from Sabor Judío: first they had to pick the recipe, then order the ingredients, prepare whatever materials would be required, and then to cook entirely by themselves within a two hour window on the last day before the holiday (with some doing a bit of prep work the day before).

They cooked incredibly well! I just provided a bit of guidance about food safety (clean surfaces, wash your hands) then sat back, provided a few reminders about time. We had an array of tremendously tasty food, from spicy soup to succulent steak and tangy horchata.

I didn’t need to grade anything, but I reminded them they had certainly earned their As with the feast we shared.

I said, I hope you will find great joy in the future, cooking and sharing meals with friends and family.

This morning, with students having had a chance to read from New Worlds, Ancient Texts, we’ll have a chance to meet with Professor Grafton on Zoom. Tony’s a mentor from my days at Princeton: the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Humanities, emeritus, with whom I read a generals field in European intellectual history (along with my dear friend Alex Bick) entitled “Discovery and Enlightenment.” Tony chafes at any sort of praise approaching what’s deserved but leave it to say he’s one of the greatest scholars ever of early modern Europe, and the classical tradition.

Apropos of my maxim that less is more, that we ought to strive for quality rather than quantity, I’m hopeful that students might achieve some depth of genuine understanding, especially if it comes from their own efforts and curiosity and desire to learn.

So much of the anxiety I sense—from students, parents, and faculty alike—arises from how much senseless, if not useless, work gets piled onto their daily plates, impedes their daily desire to engage in teaching and learning. We jam-pack so much into time that time has no meaning at all, and the intensification and acceleration of time creates an unbearable sense that we’ll never be able to do what we need to do, that we’re under water, drowning, without breath, without a sense of perspective, past and present and future. How can a full and healthy self ever develop under such conditions?

A few other ground rules for our course: strict limitations on technology (hardly any screens, no PPTs, mostly hand-written work) except a “bulls-by-the-horn” exploration of social media that we’ll soon commence, to let students, hopefully, gain some sense of control over those tools that have come to overwhelm and distort so much of their realities. I give very little homework, and anything that I really, really want them to read, I provide time during regularly scheduled class periods.

This Friday, and next week, we’ll also have a group of eight students visiting from Spain, from the community our students visited last November, and I’m eager to see how that will expand the scope of our learning.

Music! In addition to cooking, and I hope other tactile projects (perhaps some handicrafts and folk arts, particularly while visiting and learned in Spain next month) we’ve found time to listen to music, having started the course with the opening of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No 9, Op. 95 (“From the New World”), to which the students responded brilliantly, and more recently, to the final movement from Beethoven’s Symphony No 9, Op 125, along with a reading of verses from Schiller’s “An die Freude.” High culture in some sense, low, too, since I know in a society that has developed rapidly and in a place where so many seek advancement via elite educational institutions, class—social status—provokes tremendous anxiety, too.

So far, I’m not sure what if any success we’ve had but at least I truly look forward to every class, more so than any class I’ve taught in recent memory. We’ve grown, too, from an initial eight or nine students to more than twenty. We’ve students from ninth to twelfth grade and with quite a variable range of English abilities, but I’ve also made clear that however much they want to read or speak in Chinese, there’s no concern, since this isn’t an English class and most of what we’ll read has already been translated from Spanish, so as folks here might say, 差不多。

I’m hopeful that at least some elements of this course might find a home in required or more traditional elements of our school’s curriculum.

Seven weeks in, about twelve more to go this semester, and so far I’m hopeful we’ve at least oriented ourselves away from anxiety. We shall see.