* * *
I find myself pausing here, to wonder why I am writing this essay. I have two burning concerns: one is to give readers an insight into what it is currently like to teach at an Australian university. To satisfy this concern I want to tell you about semesters and classes being shortened to save money on teaching; about passing incapable students simply to keep quotas up; about teaching students for whom attendance at university is no longer a necessary part of gaining a degree. This loops back to the idea of the university as business. Asking universities to stop making it easy for students to gain entrance and to pass is like asking Coca-Cola to slow down its sales. The logic of capitalism overrides everything in the new university.
The second concern is more abstract. I want to tell you about what it is like to teach literature to habituated non-readers, and why it is worth it.
Literature isn’t, for me, a classroom. It is right at the centre of my life. I don’t ‘learn’ from it. It isn’t ‘good for me’. It isn’t work or study or a hobby. It is me. I think in lines from books I’ve read. It’s alive in me all the time, I’m helpless, it runs through me like a torrent.
This is easy enough to communicate to other passionate readers. I was used to teaching literature to creative writing students, for most of whom reading, and reading widely, was a given. At the city university where I taught for more than fifteen years we read together like a pack of wolves, prowling a text for meaning, setting up a howl when we found a good sentence or a clever way of solving a structural problem. But with English One I had to slow my thinking down, separate it into parts. I did not at first know how much this would teach me. I did not realise that I would be learning too.
* * *
Possibly the single most important component of English One is compulsory attendance. Again, if you are not a student or an employee at a university you may not know this: that most universities no longer make attendance at tutorials and lectures compulsory. At other universities and in other subjects I have had to pass students who have attended no classes at all. Not distance or online students: internal students who live not far from the university. Some non-attendees do not learn enough to pass their subject; their non-attendance bites them on the arse, we fail them, everyone moves on. But many are able to access enough information about the course to pass. And no-one can say a word about the fact that they never came to university.
Spoonfed, I hear you say? Don’t make me laugh. This is a feast of force-feeding, a Roman orgy of information and assistance, with students helpless and lolling while academics assist them in opening their mouths so the food can be tipped in, and then hold their jaws and help them masticate until it goes down. We keep asking ourselves why this generation is so anxious. There is more than one reason for this. But in part, this generation is anxious because we are anxious. We never let them do things alone: we intervene before they have had a chance to try, let alone succeed or fail. They lose confidence in their own abilities. They never get to feel the limits, or the limitlessness, of their real selves.
But in English One, students are only allowed to miss two classes out of the scheduled twelve without a documented explanation. Not only that, but if they don’t pass the subject – they are allowed two attempts at this – they cannot take their ACER literacy test, and they cannot receive their degree. I can’t tell you the difference this makes in a classroom. As a teacher, you feel traction: you feel as though you are doing something worthwhile. Your feet are firmly on the ground. These students need you, and they must learn what you have to teach.
* * *
The first assignment in English One is called a ‘Reading Reflection’. It asks students to write about their reading habits: how often they read, what they read, what they feel they take from their reading. This assignment is only five hundred words long. It does two things: it starts the students’ journey into noticing reading, thinking about their habits and what those habits mean for their academic future; and it tests their ability to write simple, straightforward sentences.
What have these students been reading before they come to our class? Some – a very few, and almost always women – have read nineteenth-century classics: the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens. Some – a very few, and almost always men – have read twentieth-century science fiction (Asimov and his ilk), and some of the Beats and their offspring: Kerouac, Burroughs, Bukowski.
The next and much larger group have read The Hunger Games, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, some or all of the Harry Potter series, and a lot of autobiographies, either by sportsmen (the men) or by women who have been held in dungeons for years by rapists (the women).
The final group, about the same size as the group of Hunger Games readers, read their local newspaper, their Facebook pages and those of their friends, their newsfeed, and the occasional copy of a women’s or a men’s magazine. None, unless they have been made to by their high school English teacher, has read anything by an Australian author, unless it was Matthew Reilly.
More than once – in fact, every semester – I’ve had a student ask me in a sneering way why they have to read Australian literature for the course. The best method for dealing with this question comes from one of my academic friends. At the beginning of a class this friend asks his students to spend a little time imagining themselves as filmmakers or writers. He gives them a few minutes to think about the film or book they would make or write, and then asks them to describe it. He writes a one-line summary of each idea on the whiteboard. Then he points to the board and says, ‘Look, Australian literature.’
If you don’t anticipate this question, or deal with it constructively, you find yourself gasping with impotent rage as you try to explain why it is important that Australians have their own voices, why it might be good to resist American cultural imperialism; and a teacher gasping with impotent rage is not a good teacher. My best-received attempt at tackling this came when I heard myself saying to a class, ‘It’s as though you speak in Australian but dream in American.’ I’m not entirely sure what I meant by this: I’m still considering it, wondering if it was just one of those Wildean epigrams that seem profound but finally mean nothing. Still, every person in the class lit up, nodding enthusiastically. It sounded true.
* * *
The first time I taught Monkey Grip in English One I was struck by two things. First, how many of my students were offended by it. They found it too sexually explicit, too full of ‘profanity’, and they deplored Nora’s method of parenting: the shared household, the children exposed to drug taking and other radical behaviours.
The second thing that struck me was how difficult my students found the ten-page extract to read. They had no reference points, no context; they didn’t know who Helen Garner was, the 1970s were too far away to mean anything to them, and they couldn’t locate themselves in the story. They didn’t know who was speaking, and who she was speaking to. How old was she, where was she, what was happening?
Here is the book’s opening sentence:
In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives.
If you are reading this essay, you’re a reader. You probably know this sentence, and if you don’t, you are comfortable with interpreting it. You can hear a character beginning to form: its romantic, optimistic, nostalgic voice; a voice yearning for simplicity; probably, in its deliberate imitation of a child’s singsong, the voice of a woman, a mother. You know it might take a few pages to learn just who this woman is. You’re skilled in this sort of patience.
But if you have never read anything more difficult than a Harry Potter book, how are you meant to proceed?
Well, there is only one way to go on, as I tell students – and that is to go on. This is the first and greatest difficulty they face. There’s no reason for them to continue reading. There is so much else to read that is shorter, and not just aimed at th
em, but in the case of their Facebook feed, tuned to their experience. Marketed to them. Why would they bother reading something that was neither for them nor about them?
The British theorist and academic Mark Fisher writes:
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many… will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’.
Pause for a minute. Return to that opening sentence of Monkey Grip. Be honest with yourself: it’s easy. The words are almost all monosyllabic, the syntax is uncomplicated, the image is vivid. Now try this, the first sentence of Randolph Stow’s 1965 novel The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea:
The merry-go-round had a centre post of cast iron, reddened a little by the salt air, and of a certain ornateness: not striking enough to attract a casual eye, but still, to an eye concentrated upon it (to the eye, say, of a lover of the merry-go-round, a child) intriguing in its transitions.
You would have to say that this is not an especially enticing sentence. I find most students I teach are pulled up short by it. But who said everything has to be enticing? Mark Fisher says:
Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
The difficulty is Stow. The difficulty is the point.
Here’s how I teach this text, and every other one. First, we read it. Yes, students are supposed to come to class having read the texts, but many don’t. Because of this, and because all of these students are planning, some day, to stand in front of a class themselves, I make them read aloud. One by one, the students stagger through the sentences. I correct them, try to nudge them along. I try not to pay attention to the blushing and giggling and the quavering voices. We go forward, through the difficulty.
Then, especially in the case of Stow, I go carefully through the text once more, line by line. First, I ask the students if they know the meanings of all the longer words. They generally don’t. Using my classroom screen and an online dictionary, we look up ‘ornateness’ and ‘transitions’. After this I talk about the context of the book, Stow as a writer, the arc of the story. Sometimes I draw a timeline on the whiteboard, showing them where we might plot Stow’s work alongside other great works of literature or world events.
We return to the text. I remind them to look at the syntax. How many clauses are there in a typical Stow sentence? What effect does this have on our reading of it?
Then, once we’ve tried to use Stow’s dense description to imagine the merry-go-round, I hand out whiteboard markers and I ask the students to come up to the board and try to draw what Stow has described.
It isn’t really a method. I make it up as I go along. All I have to help me is the fact that my regional university hasn’t yet caught up with the trend of cutting class times to save money on teaching. Our classes are two hours long, and I use nearly every minute. I’m not trying to not bore the students. I’m not trying to be what Fisher calls a ‘facilitator-entertainer’. I’m trying to push past or through boredom, trying to show them the rewards of closely engaging with a text. In a way I’m just externalising the process I – and probably you – go through unconsciously every time I read.
Fisher says that many of his students are in a state of what he calls ‘depressive hedonia’. He goes on to say:
Depression is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.
So I’m not trying to make them happy, or make them enjoy themselves. I’m trying to show them how critical engagement with literature enables critical engagement with living. I’m trying to interrupt what Fisher calls ‘the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand’. And finally, I’m trying to help them pass that literacy test.
* * *
What have my students learned? Perhaps not much. Every semester several of them fail: some resist every line of questioning in tutorials, telling me over and over again that they see nothing in the texts I’m reading with them. I had a fourth-wall moment recently, which all teachers will be familiar with: that moment when the barrier between you and the class comes down, when you stand as yourself in front of them. I’d been trying to teach a student – let’s call him James – whose response to questions like, ‘What do you think the author was up to here?’ had been a dogged and angry, ‘No idea.’ For the fifth or sixth time I approached him on one of my circuits of the class, and heard myself saying, ‘What do you think, James? No fuckin’ idea?’
We stared at each other. The class shrieked with laughter. We both blushed, and then we were laughing too, and I was apologising. But this moment broke something between us. James did not pass the subject; his written work was still not up to the job. He could not write – although he could speak, if he chose to – coherent sentences. But the work he handed in after this showed that he had tried, that he was sincerely attempting to understand the texts we were reading, and to notice their effects. I can tell the difference between a sincere assignment and an angry or cynical assignment; I’ve seen so many of both kinds.
But then there are moments like this, early on in my English One teaching, when my class were reading and struggling with Les Murray’s ‘The Cows on Killing Day’. I’ve always loved this poem. In it the poet imagines the death by knife of an old cow, from the point of view of the herd. Murray uses a first-person compound pronoun, ‘all me’, to speak in the cows’ collective voice:
All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree is with the human. It works in the neck of me and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy.
I had a young woman in my class who had already responded very positively to Helen Garner’s ‘Against Embarrassment’, a simple essay that makes a plea for unselfconscious pleasure in performance. Like many students would after her, she had read Garner’s essay in the light of her university enrolment; it made her determined to enjoy herself, to unself-consciously engage in learning, to stop being critical of herself. She’d worked several years as a dairymaid after leaving school early, thinking she was ‘too stupid’ for university. As we read ‘The Cows on Killing Day’ aloud, her voice came ringing from a desk at the back of the class: ‘But this is exactly what it’s like!’
‘The Cows on Killing Day’ elicits a variety of reactions from my students, many of whom have been brought up on and are still living on farms. I’ve had young people furious with me. They say, ‘I hate this poem. This shouldn’t be written about,’ or, ‘No-one likes it. But it’s a part of life.’ I’ve also had city- or mountains-bred students – there are a couple of them each year – who’ve never killed an animal in their life, and self-righteously feel that the poem is a paean to vegetarianism.
But this student, the ex-dairymaid, read the poem as it is meant to be read. Murray doesn’t ask for sympathy for the cow: his job is simply to use his art to show what it’s like. After this class, my student went from a pass for her first assignment to a distinction for her second. At the end of the semester she told me she’d decided to switch her teaching specialisation to English.
* * *
This is what my students have learned: how to read more than two hundred words of a text at a time. How to write something about the way they feel. And finally – and maybe this is the only thing – how to notice that a text is doing something. Not to simply look passively at a block of writing, to slump, bored, in front of it and hope that it goes away. How to notice that it is up to something. Perhaps, in the future, to read a little differently. To feel those ideas about writing, so angrily lear
ned, change the way they see.
They’ve also learned to relax a little about some of the things that upset them. What they call ‘profanity’. Graphic descriptions of sex and masturbation. And interestingly enough, graphic descriptions of anger. Loaded in particular is a furious book. I love this line, spat out by Ari, Tsiolkas’ young bisexual Greek man: ‘I read the papers. I see the news. I talk to people; white, black, yellow, pink, they’re all fucked.’ When I was eighteen I felt the same way. Even now, it feels like a necessary part of growing up. In fact, it feels like a necessary part of being grown-up. You should always be ready to see what’s fucked. But my students don’t like it. Many of them choose Loaded to write about for their final essay because it is colloquial, fast-paced, easy to read; but almost all can’t understand why Ari is so angry.
On a good day, I think they find Ari difficult because they themselves are generous people. They love their families, they are happy in the society they’ve been brought up in, and look forward to doing good when they work with children.
On a bad day, I think they find Ari difficult because the distinction between adults and teenagers has been blurred. We all want the same things now: phones, clothes, and food to photograph. We are all consumers. Teenagers don’t want to stick it to the man anymore. They are the man.
* * *
Every couple of weeks I have lunch with two close friends, long-time academics, to compare experiences, to offload some of the stuff we’ve seen. It’s the same all over. Every academic is caught between their principles and the rewards that come from abandoning them, between the demands of capitalism and their old role as guardians of higher learning. Teaching is valued less and less; our new god is management. And all corrupt systems must have their collaborators. The three of us have developed a language to describe these academics-turned-middle managers. We call them zombies. They stagger across the campus from meeting to meeting, a tickertape of acronyms flickering behind their undead eyes. Or we call them hosts, taken over by the parasite of neoliberalism. Of some we say they are more parasite than host. One of us described a particular administrator-academic as a ‘glitchy half-person’ – their self guttering like a candle, glitching between real person and corporate stooge.
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