Communication
The woman who gave me the name of this site (and still doesn't know that she did> I realy will do a where the name came from post one of these days) was a creative writing professor I worked with a number of years back. The same semester I was in her writing class I was enrolled in an introduction to poetry class that she was also teaching. In the writing class I noticed that she had what one might call an extended vocabulary. She knew the English language forwards and backwards and tried to be precise in what she was trying to convey by using just the right term. That class was more of a discussion than a lecture so my first real exposure to her style of speech was in the intro to poetry class.
What I noticed right from the first was that she was speaking about ten levels above the students. This was a 200 level course so most of these kids were eighteen or nineteen. They had little to no exposure to poetry or really to language before. These were non majors taking a filler class. I was a returning adult student taking an easier class to fulfill a humanities credit. (An adult of 23 not exactly mature but much more experienced than the kids in her class). The woman would talk at length and when the baffled students didn't interrupt her lecture with questions or comments she would go on some more. Some time during the second week instead of taking notes (basic meter rhyme stuff I had learned a long, long time ago) I started listening for what I would record as her top ten lines of (explicative deleted) delivered during the class. She could go on at length on most any tangent and while the words sounded beautiful the meaning was often just way off in left field. ( i still have some of these list and I've pondered dragging them out and transcribing them, but I dont exactly feel right about that). If input was requested from the class invariably some idiot would ask, "Is this going to be on the test." Which might elicit a dismissal or a further explanation that would just go over her students heads.
Walking away from my experience in that class I realized that while the teacher had mastery of the language she was unable to stick to the vernacular. In a hope of forcing the students to rise to her live she instead talked right past them and might as well have said nothing for all they took in. As a writer, poet and teacher of the craft of writing she was as good as they come. As a teacher to those most in need of learning to those with little understanding she fell far from the mark.
Now I'm a pretty arrogant bastard when it comes to my intelligence. I'm the guy who makes the scathing funny that the bewildered person smiles and laughs along with but doesn't really understand. Often I forget that what would help me the most would be to try to be as clear as possible with the people I'm dealing with, not to flex some intellectual muscle with an obscure reference or a word that has fallen into disuse.
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What I noticed right from the first was that she was speaking about ten levels above the students. This was a 200 level course so most of these kids were eighteen or nineteen. They had little to no exposure to poetry or really to language before. These were non majors taking a filler class. I was a returning adult student taking an easier class to fulfill a humanities credit. (An adult of 23 not exactly mature but much more experienced than the kids in her class). The woman would talk at length and when the baffled students didn't interrupt her lecture with questions or comments she would go on some more. Some time during the second week instead of taking notes (basic meter rhyme stuff I had learned a long, long time ago) I started listening for what I would record as her top ten lines of (explicative deleted) delivered during the class. She could go on at length on most any tangent and while the words sounded beautiful the meaning was often just way off in left field. ( i still have some of these list and I've pondered dragging them out and transcribing them, but I dont exactly feel right about that). If input was requested from the class invariably some idiot would ask, "Is this going to be on the test." Which might elicit a dismissal or a further explanation that would just go over her students heads.
Walking away from my experience in that class I realized that while the teacher had mastery of the language she was unable to stick to the vernacular. In a hope of forcing the students to rise to her live she instead talked right past them and might as well have said nothing for all they took in. As a writer, poet and teacher of the craft of writing she was as good as they come. As a teacher to those most in need of learning to those with little understanding she fell far from the mark.
Now I'm a pretty arrogant bastard when it comes to my intelligence. I'm the guy who makes the scathing funny that the bewildered person smiles and laughs along with but doesn't really understand. Often I forget that what would help me the most would be to try to be as clear as possible with the people I'm dealing with, not to flex some intellectual muscle with an obscure reference or a word that has fallen into disuse.
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posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 5:00 AM
2 Comments:
I have dreams where I have all the right words at my fingertips.... but instead I have the new copy of Bartlett's Roget's Thesaurus. It's really a spectacular banana yellow. Maybe I should memorize it. ;)
Barb - I think she went to a school on the west coast. Frightening to the midwestern mind.
CC - You changed your blogger handle! I've owned many a Thesaurus over the years. I think most of them were perused once or twice before being lost or destroyed. Mostly they sit on a shelf and glare at me.
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