Tag: humor

The Accidental Teacher: An Essay and Memoir (Part 6)

There were ten of us in Professor Randall’s philosophy class. The room could easily have seated fifty, so we were pretty spread out. It’s likely most of us were trying very hard to remain aloof (and perhaps even invisible) by putting as many desks as possible between ourselves and our nearest neighbors.

I, on the other hand, chose a seat right next to a buxom coed named Linda Louise Gartman, a nineteen-year-old from Iraan, Texas (spelled just like the Ayatollahs’ place but with an additional “a”). Her daddy owned a hardware store there—or maybe it was a Dairy Queen?—and she was studying business to prepare herself to partner up with him someday. Most of the other students were male—snuff-dipping types who likely drove pickups that sported Confederate flag decals—and were majoring in agriculture or some such. As for me, I was “undeclared” which is a collegiate way of saying “confused.” I had no idea what sort of work I’d be doing in the future and would have been shocked silly had anyone suggested that I’d end up being a teacher a few years into the future.

I chose my place in class because I liked Linda’s dirty-blond hair and the way her shirts fit. On about the second or third class meeting I put together a masterplan which involved me telling her my name and then saying a few perfectly chosen words that would cause her to fall in love with me. On the day I was to put my scheme into motion, I arrived early to class, slid into the desk next to her, and then froze up. No utterance would leave my mouth no matter how much I tried to push it out. Still, the sheer possibility that I might speak to her made me so hot and bothered that I had heart palpitations throughout the remainder of the class period.

The book the professor had us buy was full of excerpts from the great philosophy texts of yore. Not long into the semester, she assigned a piece that contained the “Allegory of the Cave,” from Plato’s Republic, a text I highly recommend—I count it as one of the hundred most important books ever written. After reading and then discussing it, I could see that the ancient Greek philosopher had had people like me in mind when he wrote it. I was certainly one of those who’d been exposed, up until that point in time, to mere “shadows” flickering dimly upon a wall. In his allegory, Plato was arguing that philosophy can free our minds and lead us out of darkness and into the “sunshine” of greater enlightenment. The idea that I had spent my entire life living in a cave of ignorance caused my head to explode.

I’ve spent so much time on Dr. Randall’s course because it was pivotal. It was the beginning of the beginning for me. It was the class that inspired me to start thinking about what it might be like to live the life of a thinker. To do so, though, I’d have to continue to read texts that would challenge my existing worldview and so I’d have to register for other courses of a similar type. The class was also the end of the beginning. After my introduction to philosophy, there was no way I could remain an intellectual child. I was no longer willing to accept the conventional wisdom—passed off as genuine wisdom—that authority figures had been feeding me all my life.

The course was also memorable for two weird occurrences. The first happened when Dr. Randall asked me to read aloud in class on day. I started off fine, but once I began to take notice of my voice being projected out into quiet space of our classroom, I became queerly self-conscious and terrified in a way I cannot fully put into words. I began to choke up and could barely complete the reading. Luckily, Linda was absent that day. The second weird experience had to do with the young woman I’d been so attracted to from day one. Right at the end of the term, after nearly four months had passed without me saying much at all to the object of my desire, I made Linda an offer—I sort of blurted it out, really. I told her I’d be happy to drive her back to her dorm room if she was headed that way. She then smiled and said, “Would you really do that? That’s so sweet! Yes, I’ll take you up on the offer.” We then loaded up into whatever jalopy I happened to be driving at the time and took off.

After a short trip, I pulled up into a parking spot right behind what was called “The Women’s High Rise.” Linda gave me this telling look and said, “Thank you, Troy. You’re so sweet! I’m sorry I didn’t say this to you earlier,” shortly before leaning over and giving me a kiss on the cheek. Needless to say, I felt completely flabbergasted. After gathering my wits, I drove absentmindedly away. Because the term was almost over, I saw her once or twice more, but then, after the final exam, never again.

 

 

The Accidental Teacher: An Essay and Memoir (Part 5)

I graduated from little Forsan High, in Forsan, Texas, way back when. To say the school was small is like saying that the Sahara Desert is a large area of land covered by sand.

There were twenty-one of us who received diplomas during commencement. It took the superintendent of schools—my mother had married the man not long after our arrival in West Texas so he was actually my step-father at the time—less than five minutes to call all our names and to distribute the fancily printed certificates of accomplishment. We then congregated in the vestibule of the auditorium, with our parents and the other guests still seated inside, and screamed our class chant, a thing we had artfully composed all by ourselves. It was basically an expletive-laced manifesto of how we’d just freed ourselves from tyranny and were about to conquer the world with our brains and good looks.

Of course, it took the world about five minutes to distribute all sorts of humbling experiences, which let us know, in no uncertain terms, that our existences actually meant nothing in the larger scheme of things no matter how clever or pretty we considered ourselves to be.

I left home and enrolled in a little university called Angelo State, located in San Angelo, Texas, which was just down Highway 87 from Forsan. I mostly went there because Dwayne Norton, my best friend in high school, had graduated two years earlier and was beckoning me to join him. That plus the town was loaded with bars and discos I really dug with an added bonus being that many of them featured twenty-five-cent-tequila-shot nights on a regular basis.

Up until that point in my life, I had been a good student, but not the sort who consulted with guidance counselors and such. In fact, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up—I still haven’t come up with any definitive conclusions yet—so I wasn’t one of these kids who goes to college with a plan and then follows it religiously. It was more important that I be near Dwayne and in a location where I could party like it was 1999.

I started off at ASU by taking a weird collection of courses that were all over the map. Then, just before the start of my second term, I needed to register for an elective, so I looked at the choices I was offered and picked a class called “Introduction to Philosophy.”

Our professor—I can’t precisely remember her name—but I can perfectly recall how she looked and spoke, was a woman from Belgium, which likely made her the first European I ever had contact with. Her last name might have been Randall—that doesn’t sound terribly Belgian though—and her first one could have been Janine or Jeanne. Anyway, she also taught French in the Department of Foreign Languages.

OK, so I’ll call her Professor Randall. She was probably about in her mid-40s at that time and had greying, curly hair. She wore plastic framed glasses, with thick lenses that magnified her eyes, which was very appropriate because she was able to see so much in the texts we read for class. She spoke with a slightly pinched and nasally voice and a strong French accent. But the thing about her I found most intriguing was her absolute courage. She said things in class that were brave and intended to shake our tiny bodies and minds to their cores—we were, after all, mostly kids from little towns who had never been exposed to any sort of real thinking or ideas in our entire lives.

I suppose it was her job to sort of pull the rug out from under us and she succeeded in that mission. I guess I’m being presumptuous speaking for my classmates—perhaps they all just sat there like giant, single-celled organisms and closed their minds to her talk and the texts—but I soaked it all up like a sponge that had never sipped a drop of water but had been waiting and waiting for the opportunity to do so.

Professor Randall kept pouring out those liquid ideas and I kept absorbing them so fast that I could feel that my mind was bloating. But it never did reach the point of supersaturation. There was always room to take in more and more.

The Accidental Teacher: An Essay and Memoir (Part 1)

In the fall of 1986 my life took a turn. I’m in a pretty good mood today, so I won’t say it was a turn for the worse. Ask me tomorrow, though, and I might describe it as a swerve that took me right up to the precipice. It’s all a matter of perspective.

In the fall of 1986, I became a new graduate student in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. The head of the department met with me in person, shortly before sending my acceptance letter, and told me he found my academic performance, as an undergrad, praiseworthy. As a way of demonstrating how impressed he was, he offered me the job of “Graduate Teaching Assistant”—or GAT, which rhymes with GNAT, an interesting similarity given that both are located quite far down on their respective food chains. This meant I would be both a student and a teacher. Of course, I said yes to the offer.

The department then handed me a textbook and a syllabus and pointed me in the direction of my classroom. The assignment I’d gladly accepted—but began to feel less and less confident about as the start of the semester neared—consisted of teaching two sections of a course called “Introduction to Freshman Writing,” or something very similar to that.

In truth, I was scared shitless about the whole teaching thing but was happy to have the job. That’s because they promised to pay me almost nine hundred dollars per month. Today, that sounds like nothing—and it is—but to a poor student—one so underfed that the outline of his ribcage routinely showed through his shirt—the sum promised groceries in the fridge and thus three squares a day.

The day before my teaching job was to begin, I tried hard to imagine what it would be like having so many faces staring at me from so many rows of desks. Then the actual first class happened and it was even more traumatic than I’d ever dreamed possible. The expressions on the faces of my students suggested that they expected me to say important things and give them helpful guidance. This meant that they actually thought of me as a real instructor with knowledge and ability and such. This fact scared the hell out of me and made me question all sorts of things, including the sanity of those who’d hired me.

Needless to say, I was terrible during that first term. What I did in the classroom should in no way, using the most liberal definitions available to us, be called “teaching.”

Here I am, these great many years later, still in the classroom and still wondering if I’m good enough. (Evidence suggests that I’m a hell of a lot better than I was when I first started.)

The following blogs will tell the story of the teacher who never should have been a teacher and will chronicle my growth in the profession.  They’ll also be about the foreign places my teaching career has taken me and the insights I’ve gained while doing this work. I hope those who read the blogs will find them interesting, humorous, and maybe even a bit thought-provoking.

Speaking of Politics…

Many of us had high hopes when Barack Obama was first elected. We thought he would be different. In a few small ways, I suppose he was. His name, after all, sounded unusual. And, of course, his skin pigmentation was not what we were used to in our presidents. There were plenty of signs he wasn’t your average WASP.

Right from the beginning, conservatives worked themselves into a lather. They argued—most of the time with a straight face—that Obama was the anti-Christ. He was on a secret mission to destroy the nation from within and was allied with Muslims and/or Communists in carrying out his evil plan. Now, nearly eight years later, we find that he didn’t actually take America’s guns away. He didn’t create a One-World Government and invite in the “Black Helicopter” bunch. Nor did he introduce Sharia law. I wonder what happened.

Now that the Obama lease is about to expire, we find ourselves in the beginning phases of finding a new tenant for the White House. As we go forward, I have one wish for the nation: That we continue to expand our thinking about what makes a good American president.

Open-mindedness and innovative thinking should come natural for a country as large and diverse as the United States. Even the nation’s symbols suggest a need for this. The American flag, after all, has fifty stars, suggesting multiplicity. It’s downright un-American to engage in groupthink or to close the door on certain ideas or to certain types of presidential candidates.

All this brings me to Bernie Sanders, a fellow hailing from a small state but who thinks really BIG. I’ll cut right to the chase and tell you he’s the guy I’ll be voting for. Actually, I’ll go even further than that. He’s the guy I’m going to tell others about.

I don’t normally watch shows like “Face the Nation” because they mostly invite very mainstream, unimaginative guests who offer us the same old tried (and failed) solutions to the nation’s problems. Still, having said that, I’ve included a clip because it features Sanders.

We all know that Bernie’s opponents are going to try to discredit him. They’ll call him “weird,” “effete,” and probably “soft”—on all sorts of things. They’ll call him “liberal” and very “European.” The list of terms they’ll use to describe him will undoubtedly be a very long one. On top of all that, they’ll even try convince people that he’s “scary.” But, honestly, were you frightened by anything you just heard?

Here’s what you should be scared of, especially if you belong to America’s middle and working classes. You should be terrified by the status quo—more “trickle down.” That’s been tried again and again. And we know how it turns out. The roots get starved and the whole plant withers.

What Was I Thinking?

Why in Hades did I decide to call my blog “Thinker Boy, Inc.?”

Well, I’ve always been a thinker. Even when I was a boy, I spent too much time in my head. Today, I’ve gotten big enough and old enough to become “Inc.”

I even teach thinking for a living. Can you believe people make good money doing such as that? What’s the world coming to?

Thinker Boy sounds like a slightly underachieving Superhero. He’s able to leap tall ideas in a single bound but often has trouble getting out of bed. A blog with such a name could make readers laugh and think at the same time. Heck, I’ve always found great benefit in being able to kill two birds with one stone.

Thinker Boy sounded like a fun title. Even now, as I sit thinking about it, I feel the corners of my mouth turning in a northerly direction.

I thought it would allow me to write about myself in third-person. I could stop being Troy and become Thinker Boy for the occasional blog. This would allow me to write things like “Thinker Boy did this” and “Thinker Boy thought about that.”

I took me about a week to finally decide on a name for the blog. I also liked “Mister Manifesto,” but I thought it made me sound too much like a crank.