The Rude Student: Preparing the Way

The Rude Student: Preparing the Way

            She comes in eight minutes late to class, first banging at the door, noisily dragging in a large briefcase on wheels and a large bag, both of which she parks by two open desks, mutters a curse, and leaves.  Another eight minutes later she’s back with a large, domed Starbuck’s concoction, frothing whipped cream at the straw hole.  With her other hand, she’s texting, and listening to some loud staticky music through ear buds.  She reeks of smoke. A billed cap nearly covers her eyes, which are already covered by large, mirrored sunglasses.  She doesn’t notice the others in the classroom.  But wait, there’s more.

            She’s chewing gum, blowing bubbles, and popping it. She fumbles around with the zipper of her briefcase, and yanks out a laptop which she opens on one desk, and then plops her bag on the chair in which she is sitting to hide her phone.  Feet go up on a desk in front of her.  She hums to her music, and clicks her pen to the rhythm. She sucks loudly on the straw of her Starbuck’s, which then falls on the floor and spills.  Students around her run to yank paper towels from the bathroom.  She leans her head against the wall and falls asleep. Snores.

            The she? ‘Tis I. The desk I use is the teacher’s desk. I tried to get in the part about pulling out a large Styrofoam container of fish-sticks and fries, but I didn’t know how to get it all onto the two student desks the Rude Student occupied.  It is the first meeting of my class.  The other students sit at their desks stunned, because I’m supposed to be their teacher.

            When I pull off my glasses, I poise my whiteboard marker like a cigarette between my fingers and ask:  How did you feel during my performance?  The answers from my four classes include “annoyed,” “frightened,” “angered,” “irritated,” “abandoned,” “wanting to leave,” “puzzled,”  “stunned,” “frustrated.” All these I write on the board. Someone inevitably says, “halfway through, I got it.”  Then I have them “name that rudeness,” which I also list on the board.

            Before we move on to the syllabus and protocols of our semester, I say, “All these things you felt while I was acting (out), are all the things and more that I feel when students” and then I wave my pen at the gallery of rudenesses I collected from them.  “Got it?” I ask.  They all do.  I then ask them to suggest how I might expand my act for the next time I perform this act.  Many of the moves I include here were student suggestions.

           

            Each class becomes its own family, to which we bring our own strategies for surviving a shared space and mission—in the case of a class, to learn. All the ways The Rude Student acted out are survival strategies—self-soothing oral gratification through chewing gum; eating, especially sugar; drinking; playing with the containers and navigating things to the mouth. Then there’s literally tuning out with ear buds, dark glasses, cap, sleep.  Distancing through the laptop.  Stimulating dopamine release through use of the phone.

When, in the past, I droned on about course policies (you can guess them from the scenario above), it was just more constraining rules to which to rebel. When I embody The Rude Student and appeal to my students’ empathy, I enter their consciousness through the larger portal of emotions.  And, with the performance and talk-back done, I can say the last line of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, “Now we can begin.”