I think my students, like me, are selectively aware and unaware of the goings on of the world around us. I think they also, (like I do in my relationship with them) selectively (or strategically) let on how aware they are. On one of the first days of class I asked them if they knew anything about the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings. From my perspective, awareness of these hearings was a better test than a pulse to determine if someone was alive. However, my questions elicited almost no response. One student said something about how she meant to look into but hadn’t gotten around to it. Another student said it was an impressive display of a rhetorical switch, how Kavanaugh and the Republican senators on the committee had painted Kavanaugh as the real victim of the investigation process. This was an astute observation but the student was purposefully talking around a claim that could fix him to an allegiance to either party. Otherwise, I received entirely blank faces and silence.

At first I just assumed my students weren’t tuned in. They had different priorities, they were busy, they were buffered by responsibilities, extracurriculars, and the insulation of family life. But now I realize my student are just a little cagier than I gave them credit for. Why would I expect them to reveal their thoughts on an emotional political moment, in front of 24 people they didn’t know, on one of their first days in an entirely new environment? I was trying to get my finger on the pulse of their opinions but touching someone’s carotid artery is a weird thing to do when you first meet them. I also showed them I wasn’t willing to divulge my opinions with my vague and vapid questioning style, and to a degree they were just following my lead. Now though, as they’ve grown more comfortable, and the projects more probing, they have slowly spilled the beans on their awareness of the world.

They revealed to me this awareness when they selected research topics, and developed their questions. They know what’s going on in their world, and often on a more nuanced and up to date level than I do. When one group selected a topic about human trafficking, I learned that I-5 is a hot spot for illegal movement of people. Another student asked layered questions about disability accommodations that clearly were prompted by her own life. One student wanted to research campus sexual assault, and cited a variety of statistics and possible exacerbating factors that would help specify her group’s questions. Another student, who listed Lebron James as a role model, which initially prompted a pretty meh feeling from me, (another student who just wants to talk about sports…) wanted to research how the media expects athletes to perform, not to be people with opinions, and referenced the experience of seeing his role model disrespected by the president as an emotional motivation.

My students care about what is relevant to their lives, they create effective filters for what they let in and what they release. The scope of their worldview appears to be dictated by their day to day concerns and struggles. They’re not ignorant of national politics, nor are they apathetic. I think that they just know, or intuit, the risk to themselves that comes from looking at the world, and letting the world look at them, through a transparent window. They’re trained to curate an impression of neutrality, to withhold their opinions. Maybe this is because their opinions have been devalued, some form of the anachronistic value of “seen and not heard” permeated the air in their childhood. People like to throw around the trope of the dumb and hormonal teenager.

The question I have now, when I think I’m getting to know my students’ worldviews, is about the extent to which they’re still curating these views according to some notion of what the teacher wants. A dilemma raises its horns, where on one hand, I don’t want to seem coy or glib, I don’t want to model circumspect answers to direct questions, but on the hand I also don’t want to create a value set that they have to adhere to when they reveal their opinions. I suspect that when I encounter incoherence in student views, or contradictory opinions, or when they string together multisyllabic words that don’t really make sense, it’s because they’re grasping for what they think I want them to say. They, like me, stumble on a neurosis that comes from what we prescribe as “smartness”. I do this still, and find myself thinking about how what I’m saying sounds to others, while I’m saying it, which confuses the hell out me. I guess, next time I ask my students about a political moment, or what their beliefs are, if I expect an honest answer, it will first be on me to evaluate how I communicate my assessments to them. I want them to know that I’m looking for their pulse, not because it is a bad or good or smart pulse, but so that I can know more about the blood and tubes inside their hearts.