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.”
