The World in the Classroom

Do you remember that scene in A Fish Called Wanda in which John Cleese's character explains how difficult being British can be, always afraid that he might ask someone about their parents only to find out that they had died that morning, or inquire about the children only to learn they had burned in a fire the week before? That's me.

I don't tend to ask people about their lives, not because I'm not interested -- I usually am fascinated by other people's experiences (I gravitate toward biography in my own professional interests, for goodness sake!) -- but because I'm paranoid that I will ask the precise question that will trigger PTSD in someone. Silly, I know, but there it is.

Many of my colleagues want their students to draw upon their personal experiences and share those with the class. I tend to shy away from this both because of my neurosis, but also because this likelihood of PTSD is quite high.

I feel this especially in my world history class. This class usually has the highest number of international students of all of my courses, and many of these students come from places that you have seen on the news. Darfur, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and so forth. Many are refugees. One of my collegues told me about a student who exhibited disabilities of such a nature that, put together her country of origin and her age, made him wonder what hell she had been through. Another of my collegues herself fled civil war.

Finding out that one of your students had been a sex slave or a child soldier or witnessed a massacre of their family is not too far outside of the realm of possibility. I'm afraid to scratch the surface because I am afraid of drawing blood unintentionally. Whatever their lives have been, for good or bad, those stories are theirs to tell when they want to tell them. They aren't my business unless they want to make them my business.

Last week, a student told me his. He came to me asking about our textbook. "Who is this guy?" he asked of the author. "Does he know anything?"

"What makes you ask?" I wanted to know.

"Well, I don't like the things he said about Africa," the student told me. "He gets a lot of it wrong, like my country."

This student is from Rwanda. If you are American or western, and don't know much about Africa, you probably know one thing about Rwanda, and it isn't pretty. He lived through that as a child. He told me more, too, but I don't want to tell his story for him here except to say that he told me that he could not celebrate his birthday, which fell during the period of those events, or talk about his life until he was older. Then, he said, he told his story and attained acceptance. I asked him to write a critique of that part of the text, for extra credit and for my own education. He willingly complied. He has a desire to tell the truth of what he witnessed, even if this offends other people.

This student is part of a group of friends in my class. They are so delightful in that they are just so young and goofy and full of life. They come from different parts of Africa, either recently or as children. They tease one another mercilessly, as boys do; and, while I know they are doing so in jest and affection, I do have to call them off of one another sometimes because they go too far for my comfort and, potentially, others in the class. I have forbid teasing the Nigerian about internet scams, for instance.

At the risk of writing about Africa like a typical, ignorant westerner -- no, to completely write like a typical, ignorant westerner, because that is what I am -- I am amazed by these young people. Amazed and humbled. "Who am I to stand up here and teach them about Africa and the world," I think, "when they have lived it?" (Teaching outside of anything resembling your area of expertise is one of the hazards of community college work.)

I don't know their lives. I don't want to pry; but they do bring me this information, and I overhear it in their conversations with one another. I hear their pride in their background, and I occasionally glimpse what that background has included. I also see their resilience. I want to know more, but, again, who am I? I let them tell me their stories when they feel comfortable, if at all. I won't demand that they share. This isn't therapy.

At the same time, I think their experiences and points of view are of vital importance in studying history. Sure, we can talk with certainty about the Holocaust, and rationally debunk the deniers; but what about recent events? These students' lives are part of the process of understanding history, and that process is raw and personal.

There is so much for me to read and to learn about the rest of the world, especially about Africa and the Caribbean (in fact, I feel a deep responsibility as a teacher and as a human to visit both places -- and not for the resorts). I'm of the old school of teaching, in which the teacher does, in fact, know more about the subject than the students. So standing before a class with patchy knowlege makes me feel like a fraud. Knowing that my students have lived some of the subject, makes me feel like giving up. It seems an awesome arrogance to teach them about their own lives.

Yet, my ignorance begins to guide me toward a way to approach this. As basic as this sounds, I am learning to begin with an issue. Human rights, civil war, western views of their homeland. I must create the skeleton of a subject, and let them flesh it out with the questions and animate it with the answers. This is tricky because I need a destination, and haven't quite learned where that destination should lie (the "outcomes" are so vague as to be useless in this regard -- which is actually good, but not useful).

This is a weird journey into new territory, and terrifying for me. Yet, at every step, I stumble upon the things that make the students curious. They are cynical as all hell, but they are also idealistic. They want to know more about the terror out there in the world, the evils of humanity, but not because they are ghouls. They are trying to understand "why....?" and "how...?" This is what perks them up when we get to the Holocaust. This is what make them actually wake up and lean forward during a film about the International Criminal Court.