(This piece first appeared in the online edition of the ECCTYC journal, Inside English)
The Art of the Tangent
Recently, due to a scheduling glitch, I exchanged my daytime
teaching load for night classes.
Adjusting to my new routine, I developed an appreciation for caffeine
and sugar. These traditional mainstays
of the educator’s diet succored my stamina, but also primed me with
palaver. I confess, from my lesson plans
I did digress, on occasion reprising the off-topic tendencies of my 8th
grade shop teacher, whose drill press demonstrations included colorful stories of drill press accidents and other unpleasantries meant to
raise the eyebrows of his adolescent audience.
The result was an intriguing foray into the art of the tangent.
Now, before any
curriculum curmudgeons put my pedagogy on parole, let me posit that tangents,
like red wine, offer benefits when used in moderation. When students see a teacher toying with a
tangent—in a sense, taking creative license with the organizing principle of
the lesson plan—they in turn feel more willing to take creative license with
their writing, making connections they might not otherwise. Moreover, tangents possess an entertaining
quality which can evoke curiosity. Like
pushing the pedal to the metal on a 1964 Pontiac GTO, and boosting the
acceleration with nitrous oxide, you’re just not sure where things might lead—a
fiery end, perhaps, but that blinding flash might just signal an epiphany.
Aspiring
tangentialists will find that stories from their pre-teaching employment can
offer a rich trove of source material.
Students who believe that we entered the classroom like Athena sprung
from the head of Zeus, fully armed with rhetorics and dry erase markers,
express surprise upon discovering that we once worked in food service and
retail. For my students, surprise mixes
with astonishment when I tell them my 1984 food service wages: $3.15 an hour. Students gasp when they do the math.
“You mean you
only made 25 dollars after an 8 hour day?”
“That’s right,” I
say. “Before taxes.”
These numbers
give me some street cred, which I milk for dramatic effect, adding in details
with which I hope my audience might sympathize.
I tell them of my struggle with the soft serve machine and how my boss
yelled when I made the portions too large.
Then, the groundwork thusly in place, I deliver the key point: my life, just like my students’, involved
suffering. The humanizing power of this
revelation renders me more approachable.
Like a platoon who knows the scars on their sergeant’s cheek come from
dangers faced and mastered, the class gains a sense of camaraderie. Plus, students experience a feel-good
optimism, which arises when they learn my fast food career was only temporary,
and my subsequent job, at a supermarket, paid better.
“How much did you
make then?” they ask.
“$4.25 an hour,”
I beam.
In addition to
work experience, aspiring tangentialists can mine their scholastic history for
source material. Here, let me offer a
word of caution: if you wax rhapsodic
about how you wowed the MLA with your post-modern, post-structural, and
post-relevant approach to discourse theory, you will inspire only glazed eyes
and drooping jaws. Such tales might
regale the regents at Yale or Harvard, but won’t gain much traction among
students who enrolled in your class to meet a GE pattern requirement. Rather, an academic-sourced tangent should,
in the parlance of our students’ subculture, “get real.” Often this means divulging our academic
failures as much as our success. In my
own case, students learn that my scholastic closet contains a few skeletons—such
as the one bearing the scarlet letter “E” (for “expulsion”) dating back to the
time I got kicked out of high school. At
first, eyebrows raise and foreheads crinkle as students engage in the mental
machination of picturing their respectable professor as a miscreant youth. Then students grasp the relevance of the
story. I tell them how I refused to let
failure define me, but, like them, attended community college, which laid the
path toward my future profession. This
tale of transformation resonates especially with students who feel marginalized because they don't fit traditional profiles. Polly, a 40 year
old recovering alcoholic, confided to me that she felt ashamed of her life,
because she faced not only the embarrassment of living with her parents for
economic reasons, but also the discomfort of sitting in class surrounded by
students young enough to call her “mom.”
“Your story made me feel more comfortable about my own mess-ups,” she
told me after class. “Maybe I shouldn’t
worry so much how others judge me.”
Polly went on to use anecdotes from her alcoholic years as powerful
supporting details in her essays.
Truth be told,
not every tangent to which I subjected my night classes achieved success. Some, like a nitrous-injected Pontiac GTO,
crashed and burned. But—isn’t that like
writing itself? Not all our ideas lead
to epiphanies, nor do all our sentences merit a place among T.S. Eliot’s
touchstones of the Western Tradition.
Nevertheless, we pursue our work as if they might, because at its
essence writing is an art, and art requires play and a willingness to explore
odd connections. So too the Art of the
Tangent. If you worry how its pursuit
might affect your reputation, fear not!
According to Rate My Professor, my reputation remains intact—not bad a
guy who got kicked out of high school and made $3.15 an hour flipping burgers.
. .but I digress.
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