Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the thirty-first one.
Boredom. At Michigan, my wonderful friend Anne and I took Chaucer as our one required Literature class, because we forgot to register for classes and by the time we remembered, all the easy Literature classes taught by our creative writing professors (Beat Poetry, Travel Literature, etc.) were already full. Chaucer was an advanced class full of Ph.D. students working very hard to impress the celebrated professor and each other. We were like foils, there to show how bad someone could be at this stuff. Anne was slightly better than me. Sometimes she’d bring forth a shiny-foil insight; the professor hardly hid her surprise. But I never had an insight. I struggled with actually opening the enormous, heavy book, which looked like an ancient thing. And when I did open it, I struggled with understanding the language, just trying to work out who the characters were and what was going on on the level of the plot. The class periods were three hours long and so boring. Once, Anne told me after class that she had never seen anyone look as miserable I had, sitting beside her at the seminar table. I remember what I had been thinking: this isn’t going to work, I can’t make a life out of this. It’s just too boring. What will become of me?
Horror. That classroom was the same one where, the following year, the thing I won’t write about happened. People who want to be professors are compulsively returning to the scene of the crime. Having this new job in a high school, I’m realizing how much I don’t know about how a high school works, what you do in class, how you’re supposed to act, what you’re supposed to say. It’s like by going to college, then grad school three times, and by teaching at half a dozen colleges and grad schools, I became an expert not in my field of study, but in college and grad school themselves. Like what I really wanted was not to read and learn deeply, or even to prove myself in some way, but to figure out what had happened that day at Michigan, the thing I won’t write about. But all that college and grad school teaching evoked the crime without bringing me any closer to understanding it. It’s weird: at the head of a classroom, you can’t quite see what’s going on with the students, their disses and crushes floating around the room, as anonymous and tiny as the dust illuminated by streams of late-afternoon sunlight. But that I already knew, how unimportant you feel, sitting at the far end of the seminar table, the middle or front or back of the classroom. You’re a student. Someone being taught upon. In second grade, I told my teacher that I had a migraine and was going to throw up. “You’re just nervous about the Iowa Test,” some sort of pre-No Child Left Behind testing procedure we had to do from time to time. “The Iowa Test? Why would I care about that?” I said. I was so insulted. Then I threw up on the floor.
Glory. But there’s something weird about Chaucer, something that doesn’t fit: Anne and I loved the class. We talked in Old English to each other, we laughed at Chaucer’s jokes and quoted the cute little ways he framed each tale, we made up new Old English words, we called the bar we liked the Tabard Inn. We downloaded (in the early days of downloading, when it was a hands-on task) a kids’ version of the Canterbury Tales that we read alongside the real one, to make sure we weren’t missing anything. We bathed ourselves in Chaucer, a full-on immersive experience beyond anything our professor could have imagined, especially given my glower at the seminar table. We weren’t being students, then. We were alone with each other and Chaucer. My expectations, my need to make this mean something about who I was, what I wanted and was capable of…none of that was part of it. In that quiet space called reading.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Like last year, we—me, Brian, and Bea—would love to mail you a holiday card! If you want one, please reply to this email with your address.
"People who want to be professors are compulsively returning to the scene of the crime" - wonderful!
Interesting and fun read.