I have been teaching part-time for about a year, splitting my time between two local schools -- a community college and a small, private liberal arts college. Because the classes are in the evening, my students tend to be a little bit older, they have jobs and sometimes families.
The similarities stop there, though. The students from the private school are preening and self-absorbed. They have excellent educational backgrounds and are therefore fairly sophisticated in their analysis of literature and their level of critical thinking. But their egos are tedious and their certainty that they have all the answers is, well, not much fun. The community college students are more of a challenge for me in terms of their hesitancy to ask questions, but the diversity among my students is such a delight -- I have students from Nigeria, China, Moldova, Russia, Portugal and Brazil and their enthusiastic engagement with the likes of Poe, Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hawthorne is indeed humbling.
They want to know who these writers were, what their lives were like and why they chose to write the stories that we now wrestle with in the classroom. In contrast, their classmates, students who were born and raised in the U.S., are checked out, bored and going through the motions in order to cross this mandatory class off their degree plans so that they can move on to their core (bullshit) business course which will of course lead them to business degrees and jobs later on making the big bucks wallowing around in the corporate cesspool. Thank goddess for my fabulous foreign students who are not foreign at all. They are kindred spirits to me and in a way, living breathing links to my past -- I look at them and wonder if my distant relatives who first came to America in the early years of the the 20th century were as filled with awe as the students who grace my classroom each evening. I hope so. I like to think so.
