Oh, how we wait for one another to know more than we do.

Last updated on: October 29, 2016 at 2:17 pm by Anne Carpenter

Oh, how we wait for one another to know more than we do. 2016-10-29T14:17:35-08:00 Anne Carpenter

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“Gray Areas,” by Bill Rogers. (Click the photo for the artist’s Flickr page.)

“I’m just not getting anything out of this class.”

I’ve seen the thought on students’ faces, of course. I’ve seen it in the many varieties of bored resentment that can somehow occupy young eyes. I’ve just never been told it to my face. By a student I trust, no less.

Of the two of us, I’m not sure which of us felt more betrayed by the experience.

Had we been in a movie, I’d have stood there for a breathless moment and then collapsed to my knees, touching my hands to the knife in my ribs. It is Ancient Rome and I am a centurion, and one of my charges has gently murdered me. Et tu? Or it is the future, and I am the failing mechanism of an experiment, bleeding oil into my palms. A broken creature, no longer useful, surprised to find itself not to be human.

In other words, I’d have given much to flicker into some alternate symbolic universe, into a different place or time, one where my feelings could find visual purchase. Could be mapped in all their contrariness.

As it was, I’m just a professor at a small college, I am just no one, and I sat silently at my desk for a small eternity as the words I’m just not getting anything out of this class ricocheted through me. “What…,” I struggled for even that word, and I swallowed, thinking. “What do you want me to say?”

I think my student really had no idea what to expect in having this conversation. Or in any case, they really seemed to want me to be able to fix it in a few sentences. As if I could say, “No, no, this is what class is about. This is it all along. Don’t you see?”

As if that were even…

As if I could.

The class in question is about theological aesthetics, which I’ve never taught before. It’s my career, my whole thing as a scholar, but I’ve never been asked to teach it. I’m an expert or something. (Or something?) And, actually, I’ve never been taught it except in pieces. Because theological aesthetics doesn’t exist in classrooms. (God damn it.) So, I must admit this class of mine is something of a mess. An experiment in trying to figure out how the hell to teach this thing that has never found its way easily into any classroom I’ve ever known. This semester, we’ve wandered through Balthasar and the arts, and I’ve struggled to figure out where my students are, and where they need to be. But I’ve been very careful, too. Very deliberate.

And I’ve been struggling.

Intensely frustrating, for someone normally so competent in the classroom like me.

I sat there staring into the eyes of a frustrated student, and I was supposed to…do what, exactly? A part of me wanted to burst into tears and ask what the fuck was going on, because hell if I knew. Another part of me kick them out of my office for the incomprehensible, selfish entitlement it took to walk into my office and say this to me. What was this? I didn’t know.

The student explained that I am great as an individual (I did not care, at all, to be told this), but explained that class was just confusing. It didn’t seem to be about anything.

It began to dawn on me that I had broken the cardinal rule of the classroom, and had created a class without a discrete set of items to be learned. Balthasar would be so proud. I wanted to laugh, or maybe cry.

My student passionately explained that they wanted to know what beauty is, and how it works. They said they wanted to know everything. I winced and I scowled, somehow, at the exact same time. I could feel my face contort with the strangeness of it. I gently explained that, perhaps, this was not a class where we would discover what beauty is. That, perhaps, we were learning how to look for something.

I suddenly felt something too weary for words. I couldn’t name it. I didn’t know what else to say. Guilt and anger mingled uncomfortably in me. I felt, vaguely, that something very precious and broken had been laid at my feet. And I’d broken it, whatever it was. And already I have no idea how to forgive myself for something I really only half understand.

My student never got an explanation that fixed anything.

I did not know what to say. I still do not.

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