The Dark Mirror: Reflections on Teaching
I was a bad student in high school. I was eager to participate in discussions but, looking back, I can see I was negative and lacked a willingness to compromise or consider opposing points of view. I was also resistant to being directed by my teachers. Although I did not intend to be disruptive, I often was. On more than one occasion I was held after class to be reprimanded by teachers who found me difficult. I improved during my undergrad to the point of becoming slightly above average. I was pretty good in my Master’s and very good in my PhD. My relationship with education has developed significantly over the years.
Because of that, some of my most uncanny experiences have arisen in seminar situations when I have found myself faced with students who remind me of younger versions of myself. Let's take a hypothetical case. I'll call them “Sam.” Sam always appeared confident and eager to be a leader in the class discussion, just as I had. But they also appeared to fixate on irrelevant details or commit themself to interpretations that couldn’t reasonably be supported—often as a result of their seeming to approach a text through pre-established assumptions about what the text should or would be like—to the extent that they often failed to reach a nuanced understanding of the text or contribute meaningfully to the wider class discussion. In fact, just like I once had, they even began to impede that discussion.
When my teachers had kept me behind to be reprimanded, I grew much quieter in future seminars. In that respect, my teachers had succeeded in curbing my disruptiveness, but had done nothing to address the problem with my approach to literature.
So I decided to deal with Sam in the way I wish someone had with me. Every time they evaluated a text through their expectations of what they thought it should or could have been, or otherwise clung to an unsupportable interpretation, I met them with logic and thorough reasoning. I would question their assumptions back, one after the other until, I thought, they would eventually realize that what they expected or wanted a text to be did not outweigh what they could demonstrate what a text actually was. That’s what I would have done. But they eventually just dug in and refused to take that last analytical step that would have freed them up from their problematic positioning. They just wouldn’t do it, even though I kept giving them opportunities to. I was getting nowhere, and the other members of the seminar group were not benefitting from my efforts with Sam.
I’d seen in Sam something of a dark mirror, a reflection of my worst early attitudes toward education, which I thought I’d Long outgrown.
So, defeated, I reverted to what my own lecturers had done with me—prevent them from picking up steam and derailing class discussion—while I consulted with more experienced teachers. Though, I stopped far short or reprimanding them. Rather, when Sam would rush to dismiss a text or fixate on an imagined error or unsupportable explanation, I acknowledged their point but moved on to points raised by students who were making a more authentic attempt to engage with the text. But Sam was still full of energy, full of ideas, and had a legitimate love of literature, so once I stopped allowing discussion to derail, they joined in with more fruitful lines of analysis. When other students challenged something, Sam would respond within the boundaries of the discussion, and their responses were often good. Sam still picked apart ideas, but in a style that was beneficial to the discussion. I was glad I hadn’t pushed them toward a resentful silence, because they developed, on their own, an ability to interrogate ideas in a way that was beneficial to themself and the group discussion.
In evaluating what it was that ultimately allowed Sam to develop, I came to understand that my earlier poor relationship with education came from my need to feel an ownership over or investment in the process, to be able to make decisions for myself. The further I progressed through education, the less it felt like prescriptive box-ticking process, so the better I responded to it. And I had thought that, since Sam’s behaviour was the same as mine had once been, they must feel the same way about it I did. But I realised later that their eagerness to take a leading position in the discussion didn’t come from confidence as I’d first thought, but a lack of it. Sam felt an immense pressure to be seen as being “right,” which is why they couldn’t allow themself to be “wrong” in a class discussion they had taken the centre of. When the attention and pressure to be a leader within the group was off them, they grew more comfortable with re-evaluating ideas or accepting that they didn’t know the answer right away, which allowed them to build much stronger ideas and feelings toward literature over time.
eagerness to take a leading position in the discussion didn’t come from confidence as I’d thought, but a lack of it
I’d first seen in Sam something of a dark mirror, a reflection of my worst early attitudes toward education, which I thought I’d long outgrown. In attempting to help them overcome those behaviours the way I wished someone had done with me, I realized that I had not actually entirely outgrown them. In fact, I had been doing exactly what I was critical of them for—interpreting information based on my expectations of it—which is why my earlier efforts to help them develop a more robust approach to the material failed. In learning more about them and the environment they required to thrive, I also learned more about myself, my need for ownership of my education, and that I was still not as successful at leaving my expectations at the door as I had hoped and thought I was.
