This entry is a follow-up to “Listening with the Third Ear.” The aquifer has filled and I have more to say. Threads and associations have come to mind about what to write. Family disturbances, a trip to Chicago and back, feeling ennui of not an inconsiderable weight; feeling no need to write although feeling I should write my weekly self-disclosing essay has come together to impede my creativity. I am teaching a course in written expression which has occupied my mind as I plan each weekly class. As I write now I am feeling sluggish in a writing sense. All these loose trends and concerns have not coalesced until this moment.
I am sitting here thinking about what to write. It is really resistance. When I was training as a therapist in 1976 in a clinic in Huntington, New York, I recall the head therapist comparing resistance in a client to trying to stay awake at night while reading, eyes shutting for a moment, yet the need to go on reading, but again the eyes blinking shut. The client refusing to hear, to be awake, to know and unwilling to explore or discover. Consequently I want to write, but I resist, closing my mind off to my inner self, avoiding, escaping. From the first day that a client steps into a therapist’s office it is the task of the therapist to deal with resistance.
I sense resistance in the course I am writing. I can almost palpate an insurgency in some of the students. Many come to me after class or just come to class laden with resistance to writing, although they profess they in no way are resistive. They say, some of them, that they want to learn how to write but in their avoiding assignments or unwillingness to complete some assignments we have the fungal spore of resistance show up. And what am I to do when faced with this mild insurrection. One joins the resistance. To wit, “Matt, I didn’t do the work for today.” Heard this a class or two ago. My response. “Don’t do it.” And then I walk off or go on to something else. In other words you are free to do the work or not to do the work, but I won’t sanction your behavior. You own it. After all, why are you here?
Kazantzakis’s epitaph comes to mind: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” No course and no student will impede that in my self.
“Matt, do we really have to do all 15 items you asked us to do?” I answer. “Do what you want, answer what you want.” I will not press, convince, encourage unnecessarily. The choice is yours. Like therapy, you asked to come into this environment. You asked to take this course. I am not here to entertain you, but to teach in a good way. Everything else you want from me — be funny, tap dance,. entertain — is an expectation you have of me. I will not fulfill your expectations except to say that I will do my job as best as I can.
There is a counter-transferential downside to all this. I feel used or abused, hapless, not heeded, humored, all those trace feelings when one tries to do one’s best and it is met with indifference — resistance. So after a class or two of this I have discussions with myself, trying to defuse the resistance or deactivate it by considering ways to handling the resistance. You might say, after reflection, all classes in secondary schools are varying examples of resistance. A great teacher has mastered how to defuse resistance in his classes. Once that is accomplished real learning can begin.
I may have missed the boat with this writing class. Perhaps I should have asked them what their expectations were on day one. This coming Wednesday, after five classes, I will do that as well as express my need for a mid-course correction, for I grow impatient with the lack of participation of people in the later stages of life. I cannot get them to cohere as a group. It may well be the way I go about teaching, it may well be their ennui. In any case I will express my dissatisfaction. They may argue that it is I who cannot keep the class together. And that may be so. And if there is truth in that, I will withdraw and go back to living my own life which is writing at this time. I do feel that at some levels they are recoiling because of my intensity as a teacher; or to put it another way, they may be intimidated by someone who has such a strong commitment to what he is, and to what he is teaching. In my life I have often been misread as well as misinterpreted. What is for sure is that I am not wasting a moment when I teach, teaching with rigor, teaching with determination. Only one woman sees that and made a wonderful comment to me after class. But one swallow does not a summer make, alas.
I find it bitterly ironic that some instructors at this school run tapes, show videos produced by others to amplify if not structure their courses. I don’t believe they know what is a lesson plan much less teaching methodologies. I find that a cop out. Yet what I find to be ineffective teaching is often sought out by students in droves. Who knew? Perhaps I am not entertaining enough. Perhaps the teaching of an idea, concept or writing technique is not as stimulating as watching the boob tube built around a flimsy syllabus. So I then become retro man.
It must be that: I do not own a smart phone; I am only somewhat computer literate; I edit with a pencil and paper; I don’t suffer fools which abound in this culture of the outer-directed; I cherish people who are inner-directed; I like story in my movies and not special effects; I read books not Kindles; I detest line-dancing and all that implies, the North Korean group cha cha; I don’t twitter and what the fuck is all that about; when I am good and angry at someone I inform him that he is not a serious human being; I revel in being a grumpy old man for there is much to grumble about in this shabby, craven and decadent culture we presently live in and as an old liberal I detest Cruz, O’Reilly, Hannity, Ingraham, Limbaugh, Krauthammer, Palin, the detritus of a soiled America. I equally loathe passivity in students, which I am presently facing. Perhaps I should have a large poster in the front of the classroom of the Emersonian evangelist, Wayne Dyer, king of the bromides, Deepak Chopra as his footrest. When unctuous interviewers on PBS speak with Dyer, the mass merchandiser, in downcast moments I feel like giving it up and like Sam in “Soylent Green” enter the ovens.
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