when teaching completely throws you off

I teach two sections of Advanced Exposition devoted to the personal essay. This is the third semester I've taught the course, but the first time I've had two sections. On Monday, I wrote here about how excited I was to be teaching Cheryl Strayed's essay, "The Love of My Life." And in the morning class, it was fantastic. It was essentially a love fest, all of us sitting around talking about what we loved about it. Sure, there were a few students who didn't quite love it, but they were able to see what she was doing and why she was doing it. The theme of that morning class became, in reference to the essay "how much honesty can we take?"

Well, my afternoon class couldn't take very much honesty. I was completely floored by some of my students' reactions to the essay. I purposely saved this one for toward the end of the semester because by now students have the vocabulary with which to articulate what's going on in a personal essay. But so many of my students couldn't see past the first line, "The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week." This is not to say that there weren't a few in the afternoon class--mostly females--who loved it. But lots of the men wanted to judge her even more than she was judging herself.

But there was a bright spot later that day. One of the men from my afternoon class emailed me to say that he'd just finished reading Strayed's other essay, "Heroin/e," and he liked it and thought perhaps I should think about pairing the two up so that naive students like him (his term, not mine) wouldn't be so quick to judge.

And that is what I shall do.

I feel a bit as though I've been pushed out of bed. My admiration for this essay has been challenged, and I feel therefore as though my own taste has been challenged.

I'm awake now.