Teaching Today

At times, teaching itself can be rewarding, especially in those few moments when, despite a culture that actively encourages stupidity and indifference, even a "studied" indifference, younger students actually respond to something that I say. Most of the time, they, like my colleagues, view me as a lunatic, an eccentric, or, even more often, a bore. And at those times I ask myself, what awful crime did I commit in a previous existence to merit such a hell. A student asks me why she didn't get an "A" on a paper if she did all that was asked in an assignment, and I tell her that, while she believes she did everything on the assignment, her work still didn't have as much quality as I was looking for. Only in a society that sees writing as a form of filling in blanks can such a notion thrive, can the idea of quality evaporate. But perhaps I, too, am a parody of the intellectual. The cynical idealist--the oldest cliche on the planet. I can't go on. I'll go on. Go on?