TEACHING FATE As I walked toward Olson to teach my Introduction to Literature class, I thought about the day's lesson. I had assigned Harold Pinter's "The Dumb Waiter," a surreal play about two hit men waiting in a basement. Food and items mysteriously arrive on a dumbwaiter. Although strange, the work is funny. Suddenly I stopped. I had remembered when I first read the play, and the memory paralyzed me. It didn't matter that I was late to class or that I was standing in a bike path; I couldn't move. I had been a first-year student, trying to seem as smart as everyone else even though I knew that I wasn't. I suspected that admissions had made a mistake, but I was determined not to show how overwhelmed I felt. One invaluable technique was to suggest a superior intellect by dismissing material as "stupid." For example, modernist poetry, biology labs, statistics, the writings of Kant and Hume, all were "stupid." The day we read "The Dumb Waiter" the class was taught by a graduate assistant. He read passages aloud, laughed out loud and became increasingly frustrated as we sat there mute and waiting for the hour to end. "Don't you think this is funny?" he asked. We didn't. "What do you think?" he pressed. We didn't say, but we thought it was stupid. As bikes rocketed past me, I realized my students were going to hate the play. This is how fate smirks at us. Fifteen years later I had become that graduate assistant. I was going to express my love of a work to students who would not understand it and would be hostile to it. In short, they were younger versions of myself. I used to have a better understanding of this dynamic because I used to be a younger version of myself. Years ago when I started graduate school, I was closer in age to my students than to my professors. Now, however, every fall I'm a year older, but my students never age. They remain perpetually young--18, 19 and 20--and the age gulf between us inexorably widens. I move further from them and closer to an understanding of my own professors. I used to viciously mock one of my literature teachers because he would drone on about obscure poems, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had enormous tufts of hair growing out of his ears. Now I assign the same stupid poems about wheelbarrows and jars in Tennessee. Now I drone. And a couple of years ago, as I adjusted my rearview mirror, I saw with horror hair emerging from my right ear. I pulled over to the side of the highway and began screaming. My students did hate the play. They didn't think it was funny. They sat sullen and silent, looking at me as if I were a freak. Usually this would upset me, but I realized it was because I expected them to be different and better students than I was. When I become frustrated at their resistance to the readings, I should remind myself about the overwhelmed undergraduate who railed against the tyranny of grammar and insisted that Cyrano should just get over his "complex" about his nose and get on with his life. As I become a professor, I need to remember who I was as a student. And I need to keep my ears trimmed. -- Joseph Mills, Ph.D. '98