François Truffaut, the great French film director, once said, "When I start a film, I intend to make a masterpiece. Halfway through, I hope just to cross the finish line."
Alas, that's the way I feel about teaching college English.
Each fall, I walk into my English 101 classroom at College of the Desert intending to create a once-in-a-lifetime learning experience. I imagine transforming a room full of reluctant, overwhelmed students into a community of Hamlet-enthusiasts, debating Polonius's advice, or pondering whether Plato's delusional prisoners-chained-in-a-cave could just possibly be—them.
I wish.
Instead my students seem to invite me to pull each guarded, half-formed thought from their skulls with red-hot tongs, while unerringly calibrating the minimal effort required to earn the grade they want. Halfway through the semester, I'm limping. By the end, I barely manage to crawl over the mountain of final research papers to tote up grades on my elementary-school abacus.
It's discouraging, not because they're willfully resistant—I was once that student—but because, after twenty-five years, I'm still not the inspiring teacher I aim to be. I want to spark breakthroughs, create opportunities to excel, and weaken the grip of conformity and social-media-inspired daily panic.
Sometimes I succeed. One year my honors students produced an entire book of essays on finding truthful information in the Internet age. Another time, a middle-aged student—newly out of prison and in A.A.—was thoughtfully rebuilding his life, one searching essay at a time. And then there are the smaller, still-sweet victories: a sentence so unexpectedly alive and sharp it stops me in my tracks.
I was that student once, too.
So, like Truffaut, I keep showing up, keep aiming for the masterpiece—even if most semesters leave me just grateful to crawl across the finish line.
