Slacker Soup
We were supposed to read a few chapters of Joyce's book a week and then they were explained in class. That was the theory. I don't remember much from that class. I remember reading the chapters, giving up halfway through, then coming to class. I remember sitting near the front and I would scribble half a page of notes because I couldn't comprehend what he was trying to explain. I left the class with more questions than I started with. The explanations of the reading only led to more and more confusion. I was vaguely aware of the topic and about half the year I was eating Slacker Soup every day in that class.
I stopped doing the readings because I didn't understand them anyways. I doodled in my notebook and played on my computer and because I was always typing, the professor would continue to drone about Freud and Plato and Joyce. We had two essays and three quizzes that semester. I did okay on the quizzes, but it was the papers I excelled at. I'm not sure how to this day. I did a paper on Nietzsche and I think it had something to do with literature?
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| Sigmund Freud |
I remember that Freud was saying that we constantly repressed the Id, or the child in ourselves ("I want"), and sometimes that emerged and upset society. I think I would have loved to have seen Freud against a feminist.
Regardless, you can see I didn't learn much in that class. Here's the magical part, I passed that class with a B. I'm not sure how that happened because I barely knew the names of these dinosaurs let alone their rambling theories of the human consciousness.
That happens a lot in school. I still have the amazing ability to not read and contribute to the conversation based off of context. Some teachers try to combat this in classrooms by creating impossibly specific tests and activities as if to punish the non-reader. As a teacher I want to do the opposite. I want to encourage kids to read with texts that they find interesting. I want to discuss what they're passionate about, because Slacker Soup does nothing for kids in the long run.
Content storage cannot emerge from difficulty and punishment.
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