A Good Day’s Help?

I’m walking with the soles of my shoes a foot above the floor. Today was my first day back teaching for the Fall semester, two computer-lab sections, and oh it sizzled and it swung. I wish you’d been there.

I first got the opportunity to teach freshman composition five years ago this Fall, and ever since I’ve understood that it’s what I want to do. Yes, I’ve had plenty of abysmal teaching days, days when I was unprepared or days when the students were burnt out and miserable and silent from midterms, days when we found out that the state had just eliminated the majors or the funding for one third of the students in the class, and the third morning of the semester when I numbly tried to lead a numb 9:30 section on September 11 when one of the planes had left from Logan. And even those days have been the reasons why: it’s the same weird sense you get on a 48-hour desert convoy when you’re in chemical gear for the third time that day and it’s up past 110 degrees and the convoy’s doing less than five miles an hour and you’re like, “Yeah, this works.”

But — to quote the man himself — today was a good day. Despite the predictable bumbling of our campus IT department — despite a summer’s lead time, these guys (who are, yes, uniformly male) managed to leave us with two labs full of non-functional computers: we’re talking about a staff that couldn’t pour the water out of a boot if you wrote the instructions on the bottom — I had me a rock-steady lesson plan (for a new syllabus, no less) that telegraphed course goals, got students using one anothers’ names, and got us all writing and interacting, twice over, in service of assignments that go the full fifteen weeks out. And the best part was that I had no fewer than six students in the second section who used the construction “I hate writing” in introducing themselves who, by the end of the class, were into what we were doing.

Which is where I ask your advice. You (yes, you) know I’m requesting IRB approval to do a pilot classroom study that asks some preliminary questions about the intersections of student experience with class, computers, and composition. You know, perhaps, my feelings about the ethics of representation (125K PDF file), and my feelings about what happens when instructors feel they can speak for students. You know, as well, that I’ve got a Creative Commons license for what I publish here, which — according to the Pew Internet and UCLA surveys — can be read by the sixty or seventy percent of Americans who use the Web.

So if you were a student, would you want to be talked about here?

And all of a sudden, I’m silent. I can’t tell you anything about my class. What happens if I talk about that male student I have every semester; the student who inevitably seems to need a male voice to butt his head against, the type who I recognize and accordingly put a Savannah drawl back into my voice and use some pseudo-profanity when I call on him to make him happy about the dominance relationship? (I sometimes wonder how effective it would be for me to bare my teeth and beat my chest and wag a half-gnawed thigh bone in his direction. Same thing, basically. Hm: think I could get that into Social Text? — What credibility problem?)

In any case: according to the ethics of representation, can I get any more specific about telling you about how good my day was without imperiling my students — the ones to whom I owe my utmost allegiance?

I fear not.

Edited to remove the tired & incoherent couple sentences at the end. The point of those sentences: as someone who wants to be an ethical and responsible teacher, how much can I publish about my day?