"The Learning Curve"

Reflecting a bit about last week's discussion about on students' and teachers' expectations, I remembered David Sedaris' book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, wherein he tells us his about his one and only teaching experience. Midway through his lovely anecdote, entitled "The Learning Curve," Sedaris expresses his loathing of the writing workshop: "The perfect balance between sadism and masochism."


As an instructor, Mr. Sedaris' own expectations stare far away from realistic. He admitted that he had prepared no lessons, nothing, expecting that students would talk without provocation, "offering their thoughts and opinions on the issues of the day. I'd imagined myself sitting on the edge of the desk, overlooking a forest of raised hands." Wow. To expect that writing students--or any students--would talk without provocation is just callow. After several failed experimental assignments, he decided to show One Life to Live episodes coupled with "guessay" assignments: "brief predictions of what might take place the following day." He confessed to his anger when, after thinking that he had actually taught his students something, their predictions left his expectations utterly unsatisfied.

Sedaris' approach falls far short of his students' expectations, clearly. One student transferred to another class after Sedaris encouraged smoking in the classroom. Following his instruction to write a letter to their mothers in prison, a student revealed that both her father and uncle were serving time and called the assignment "really . . . depressing." A middle-aged, returning student, fed up with his course and his lousy feedback, asked him squarely "just who . . . in the stinking hell do you think . . . you are?" Talk about unmet expectations; can you imagine the layers of rankling disgruntlement that built up before such a question came out of her mouth?

Another example of unrealized expecations, Sedaris' experience with beginning writing students leaves me with no better an impression than Shaughnessy's. I could be overly optimistic and proclaim that if I hold students in high expectations, I will see them met. Still, I choose to stick to a simpler doctrine: don't expect.