The Major, Panicked

Maybe a second’s worth of open-mouthed speechless panic.

That’s what I think I gave The Major when I used the phrase “I came out” to describe to her one of my interactions with students today, and I’ll confess, I’m feeling some impish pleasure in that.

The pedagogical context: I’ve repurposed the first essay from my UMass syllabus as the second essay in my syllabus here. Both are variants of the analytical complication of the personal essay, with the UMass staff syllabus and Text-Wrestling Book calling it “The Contexts that Make Me.” The UMass assignment asks students to reflect on the complicated intersection of events and circumstances from their past that produces certain character traits in themselves that they see as somehow unique. The assignment as I’ve revised it here asks cadets to reflect on the past causes and possible consequences of a certain character trait they see in themselves. However, because of the staff text I’m using this semester (Ramage et. al’s Writing Arguments), the assignment has a considerably different feel: the portions of the text I’ve been able to assign (both as background and as example) in my current modification of the UMass assignment deal much more with linear, logical cause-and-effect relationships, rather than the complex and recursive (and sometimes messy) relationships to which the Text-Wrestling Book pointed.

Whether I correctly anticipated the pedagogical consequences of that shift remains to be seen. However, I attempted to compensate for those consequences by suggesting explicitly in the assignment that the cadets’ audience for the assignment would be civilian college students likely at least a little suspicious of typically Army-associated examples and values. And said suggestion was what led to the interaction I described to The Major: after some discussion and caveats on my part about how to not come across as “uncritically Hooah” (or, as one cadet put it, as “an Army tool,” with tool meant in well you know what slang-pejorative sense), with accompanying examples, I got the frustrated question: “Sir, were you ever in the military?”

See, I’d been careful not to reveal that information to cadets, largely out of curiosity as to how they’d perceive and respond to a civilian professor at a mostly military institution. But, yes, I came out to them and admitted that I’d served, which seemed to give them a sense of satisfaction — and I’m not sure that was an ambiguity I’d wanted to resolve, which is why I mentioned to The Major that I “came out” and gave her such apparent consternation. I think the cadets want to do that linear cause-effect analysis on me and say to themselves, “Oh, he served; we can be comfortable in certain common assumptions and beliefs,” and that’s precisely the sort of thing I originally wanted the assignment to complicate.

Hence my smugness at The Major’s apparent OMG teh gay! reaction: Maybe I gave her something startling that made her re-think her assumptions about me, I told myself. And that’s what I want my cadets to do, as well, about themselves and about others. They want simplicity; they want demonstrable and logical cause-and-effect relationships. They want right answers that are clearly and readily apparent.

They’re not gonna get any of that in Fallujah or Sadr City.