Title image detail from Taste the Rainbow by Tina Berrier, Acrylic on stretched canvas, 22″ by 30″, 2023.
Are You a Seeker?
It was Spring Semester. What some might call a new beginning, even for a 56-year-old veteran who’d spent 20-plus years teaching writing to unimpressed undergraduates. Granted, Ellie Baines was a part-timer, what they termed “adjunct faculty”, at Tamarac College, aka contingent worker with limited prospects and zero job security. There had been dreams of tenure once but, suddenly it seemed, she was too old. This was the subtext of the warning she’d received at the end of the prior term, when the department chair let Ellie know that her teaching practices were moldy and needed to vamoose with yesterday’s trash.
Those weren’t the Chair’s words. The never-sweaty Anika Chandra would not speak like that. A stunning woman from Mumbai with amber eyes and perfect posture, who waved hairless arms in elegant swirls, made functional phrases like “active learning” and “practical skills” sound like poetry. She pointed to a faculty decision to adopt “Best Practices in Teaching” backed by current research.
Of what? Ellie had asked. She wasn’t being snide. She seriously wanted to know who studied what when reaching conclusions about how to teach college students to express themselves with gusto and verve.
Whatever. The details didn’t matter. Dr. Chandra would be happy to provide a list of resources (delivered in a terse follow-up email). What Ellie needed to know at the moment was that several students had lodged complaints. The college was witnessing an increase in reports of undergraduate distress. Visits to the Wellness Center were climbing, prompting a need to identify triggers. One anxiety producer: a class that felt unhinged. (Summary here. Not a quote.) Ellie’s teaching methods pulled the trigger. And no, Dr. Chandra said to Ellie’s mumbled “rubbish,” a special concern is not unwarranted. The younger generation had many reasons to be depressed. Dr. Chandra’s frown, soft and sympathetic, conjured thoughts of young people stuck inside bare rooms, isolated, unsure of the future, afraid to make a decision.
Ellie instead pictured bodies in tiny bathing suits sprawled on sandy beaches or gathered in rowdy circles shouting “Chug! Chug!” to some fool gulping a bottle of beer. Yes, “the Rona” (coronavirus) had caused hardship a few years back, but not for the affluent who attended Tamarac College, the ones who flew in packs to sunny locales during Spring Break at the height of the national alert. She’d seen the photos. Didn’t blame them—would’ve done the same thing. But why pretend that they were extra fragile?
Ellie said none of this. Instead, she promised to do better, then spent winter break surfing the web to get a clue about what “active learning” meant. She wondered which came first, student anxiety or all of the invitation to claim it issued by centers devoted to concepts like “wellness.” Name an affliction, devise a cure, justify your existence.
Such theorizing wasn’t her job now. Her job now was to show concrete evidence of an improved attitude.
On the first day of Spring Semester, Ellie raked a comb through pigeon hair, found a cream-colored pullover without stains, and stepped into loose khakis that were clean and pressed. Attitude adjustment number one: a tidy appearance. Attitude adjustment number two: upload preplanned classroom presentations to a flash drive. Present lessons in easy-to-read fonts. With pictures. Indeed, Ellie’s winter web search led her to understand a basic “active learning” principle: Students don’t like surprises. Students get anxious without a plan. Students liked to know what they were getting into in advance of learning—a convoluted idea, but okay. The point: Organize. Reduce all ideas to consumable bites. Calm the mind with clarity and plain-spoken directions. Do not champion the antics of ambiguity.
Once at campus, Ellie managed the icy patches. She did not flip on her backside as she had the prior year, when people pointed, laughed, then stepped over her body as if it were a flailing crab. She found her assigned room, took off her coat, and stood at the head of the class, pressing her lips in and out of her gums, rallying her spirit, prepared to try again. After a few “Welcome to English 101” remarks, she turned on the high-tech SMART screen (new technology for new behaviors. No more scratching chalk across a filmy chalkboard), pecked at the keyboard, and introduced the syllabus.
Per Best Practices advice, Ellie went over every line. You could no longer say, “Just read the thing. You’ll get the idea.” Ellie spoke slowly as she described learning objectives, required texts, grading scales. She said students would be partners in learning, even when it came to grades.
Then Ellie paused and looked up. Just as she suspected. No one was listening. She saw eyes closed, “get me through this crap” expressions, and hunched shoulders searching phones for better amusements.
Ellie surveyed the room of 22 bodies jammed into 22 desks, a collection of mostly Caucasian men and women (boys and girls) from nearby suburbs and farming towns, all strong and healthy with muscular frames and blank expressions. As varied as a box of Kleenex. Tyler looked like Justin who looked like Jake who looked like Will, bearing the same blue-eyed placidity. Similarly, Emily looked like Alexis who looked like Jessica who resembled Paige—lengthy limbs, long straight hair, males and females dressed in sweatpants and t-shirts, and sometimes bedroom slippers. When Ellie handed back papers, she couldn’t tell them apart.
Tamarac College was a striving school, a “we’re getting that prestige!” school. Marketing departments had been formed and personnel hired to produce glossy brochures that identified college strengths and strategic goals, all to convince parents that $60,000 a year for tuition was not ridiculous. Ellie knew that no matter what those brochures promised about preparing their children to become world-class leaders, their offspring were in it for something else: sports. Football and soccer and tennis and track—whatever allowed them to perpetuate the fantasy of being a full-time athlete, even if mediocre. There would be no national tournaments or product endorsements. No matter. Regional competitions sufficed because they, too, demanded discipline and devotion to a charismatic coach.
Ellie gauged the listless reactions to her proposed topics. She knew that most of those gathered in Room 216 of the Education and Science Building aimed to replicate the affluence of their parents’, choosing to attend what was effectively an upmarket vocational school that would train them to be satisfied with white-collared pursuits of finance or actuarial studies or marketing, or “sports management.” Whatever that meant.
“Ok, folks,” Ellie said. “It’s time for the introductory `ice-breaker.’” Another recommended activity from the web. Start class with a “low-stakes” activity —something easygoing. Ditch the challenging intellectual quandary that could intimidate. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Take out a piece of paper and answer this question: Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten?”
Although indifferent to the prompt, Tamarac students were basic rule-followers; they snapped open three-ring binders, took out pens, and composed responses. All of which took half a minute. Each read brief responses out loud. The basic plan was to make as much money as possible.
Ellie sat in the center of the room, hands folded in her lap, legs crossed at the ankles, her head angled in that “lean in and listen” pose. Soon the blahs set in. Her right foot twitched.
“Ok, that was nice,” she said, rubbing her palms on the khaki pants as she stood. “Nice job.” Positive reinforcement. She could give it.
“And nice plans! Wow. You sure seem certain about everything. When I was your—” Ellie interrupted herself. That was the kind of meandering that she was supposed to avoid.
“Ok. Ok,” she said. Then, on impulse, “Now, let’s try something else. Something different. Let’s do this again, only this time, instead of saying the first thing that comes into your head, why not put some thought into it? Right. This time, let’s have some fun. Everyone, stay anonymous. That means, don’t write down your name. But!” She paused, lowered her voice, “Write down a secret. Some of you, write something that is true. Some of you, write something that is false. We’ll pass the hat and you pick one and read it out loud. We’ll take a guess about who’s being honest.”
Good! An active way to introduce the topic of rhetoric and the question of how we make decisions about what to believe.
More tepid results. Their secrets amounted to a recitation of “fun facts.” (“Fun Fact: I like to call my cat Mr. Bunny Cuddles when no one is around.”)
They were doing that mask thing—hiding behind the banal and inoffensive. This was not how they talked to each other. When walking across campus the other day, Ellie had overheard a group calling out, “Crybaby cunt!” Laughing. Obnoxious but lively, exhibiting energy they never mustered in class. Ellie remembered one bit of advice repeated by many “best practices” advocates: teachers should try to “meet students where they live.” Well, why not?
After the relay of the last dismal fun fact (“Sometimes I eat chocolate for dinner!”), Ellie paced the floor, mulling over what to say next. “One of the things we’ll explore in this class,” she began, “is how we use language. The choices we make about what to say—those choices matter. In such significant ways.” Ellie stopped and gazed out the window. “Nothing about language use is automatic. Or natural. But how we think about language use is consequential. The words we use influence how we live, how we feel, how we see the world around us.”
Ellie walked over to the whiteboard and picked up a magic marker. “Let’s take an example. Let’s say you want to `throw some shade at someone.’ Isn’t that how people your age put it?” She grinned. No one grinned back. She kept going. “Let’s say you want to lodge an insult. Which of the following is more insulting?” Ellie turned to the board and wrote:
You fucking Cunt.
You’re a Dick.
She faced the class. “Here are two phrases—two common phrases that many use on campus. You’ve heard them, right?”
No one spoke. At least she had their attention. Ellie smiled wider, this time with teeth, and as she spoke, her voice rose, excited by the prospect of piercing their lassitude. “Now, do these two phrases say the same thing? Do they carry the same weight—the same power? If not, what’s the difference?”
The students sat up straight but remained silent. Ellie tried again. “For example, does anything strike you about the way these phrases convey attitudes about gender?” Five minutes passed during which Ellie rephrased, sought responses. Nothing. At the end of class, 22 bodies filed out without looking at her.
What followed: Another trip to the office of the department chair. Complaints had been made. Offense was taken by the suggestion of lying. And by the way, did she use the word “fuck”?
Ellie sat before Dr. Chandra’s handsome mahogany desk, biting a hangnail. This time, Dr. Chandra spoke with a clipped tone. If a teacher has that many complaints, surely there is a problem? Right. And then Dr. Chandra reiterated the importance of best practices identified by the anointed, and for a moment, Ellie thought that they were having a conversation.
“That’s what I was going for!” Ellie heard the high-pitched defensiveness. She cleared her throat. “Active learning. Getting them involved.” Dr. Chandra clasped her hands, swiveled her chair, then pulled a yellow pad of sticky notes from a desk drawer. Gold bracelets clinked on umber skin as she wrote down something important. The verdict: This time, Ellie would be assigned a mentor. Someone to observe her class and make suggestions. Someone able to discuss objectives and procedures and how to motivate in ways that had been proven to work. His name, Timothy Barnett, a person who . . .
Ellie pictured standing and shouting, “I Quit!” A fist pound to the desk. Then she pictured the overdue health insurance bill with its obscene new premium. Between these thoughts she heard Dr. Chandra pronounce words like “new hire” and “up on the latest research” and “specializes in multimodal studies.” Sounded like a lump of cold mashed potatoes.
The meeting ended. Ellie picked up her backpack, walked into the hall, shoulders slumped, neck curved, her ears ringing with the words, “Don’t say dick.” “Don’t say dick.” “Don’t say dick.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Dr. Timothy Barnett was glaringly handsome. The kind that made hearts rumble and mouths splutter inane comments like, “Whoa! Where’d you come from?” Angular jaw. Tall. Muscular. Thick hair with a chocolate curl atop a creamy forehead. A rare male specimen in the field of English studies, which tended to attract the short and pudgy variety of the Y chromosome. Dr. Barnett was also young. In his mid-thirties, but looked as guileless as a boy of 12 with green eyes that held no fear. That didn’t mean fearless. Rather, he had the look of someone who had not yet wrestled with demons. It was difficult to take him seriously.
“When I taught at UW-Milwaukee, everyone loved me,” Ellie said as soon as they sat down. Their meeting in the school cafeteria was accompanied by sounds of the hurried and harried–clattering dishes, loud chatter—the noise of survival. “I won teaching awards. Did you know that? I was voted Most-Helpful-for-Future-Endeavors by graduating seniors. Embarrassed the department because I wasn’t one of their tenured. That’s why I had to leave.”
Dr. Barnett tilted his lovely head and hefted one ankle across his knee.
“I saw that in your personnel file,” he said with a relaxed amiability that came across as mild and unassuming. Like others at Tamarac College, his manner was warm and hospitable and easy to underestimate. Ellie put up her guard.
“I have taught every kind of student out there,” she said. “Smart. Slow. Rich. Poor. City. Rural. Religious. Atheist. All ethnicities. All genders. Trans. Poly. Cis. Yes, I know the current terms. And before this school, they loved me. All of them. Loved me. I still keep in touch with many. Here. Letters. Actual letters, not emails.”
She picked up and dropped a stack of correspondence, evidence from a previous era. “Here,” she said and pulled pink stationery out of a pink envelope with browned edges. Ellie waved the sheet at Dr. Barnett, pointed to the scripted handwriting, the “Hello Dr. Baines!” As she refolded the paper, her fingers trembled.
“One gave me a money tree,” Ellie said, picturing the red hair and easy smile of a girl who’d already embraced a motherly instinct, having been saddled with the responsibility of caring for younger siblings. “She crafted a miniature tree out of cardboard and attached dollar bills to it. For good luck.”. Ellie’s voice faltered as she remembered. “Ok? See that? Do you think I need a babysitter?”
She sat back, splotches of red burning her cheeks.
Dr. Barnett’s nodding forehead was creased in lines of concentration as he murmured “well I see” and “sure sure sure,” lost in some tangle of thoughts that needed review. “It’s true that Identity categories can be – uh- important. Right now, though, we’re most concerned about what kids need to learn. Too many are using AI to coast through classes. We want students to love to learn.”
They sat in silence. Ellie realized that Timothy Barnett was a methodical man, the kind who read every line in a brochure of directions and assumed others did the same. He therefore expected everyone to hang on while he took his sweet time formulating Very Important Ideas. Ellie narrowed her eyes, clamped her arms across her chest and waited.
Finally, Dr. Barnett’s brow cleared, his eyes brightened and he inched forward in his chair. “How about this?” he said. “What if we called this a joint learning session? I’m sure that you’ll teach me many things as well.”
This he said in a commanding manner that accentuated the disparity between tone and content. That inclusion of “we” was especially irksome.
“What’s your specialty?” Ellie asked, keeping her voice even. The question was dishonest. She knew everything one could know about him from the internet. She knew, for example, that he graduated from Tulane, wrote a dissertation about the reading patterns of high school seniors who used social media, that he taught in the South before nabbing a tenured position at Tamarac College. She’d also learned that he lived in a house near a golf course with a wife named Carrie. They were expecting their first child.
“Well, that’s why I’m here,” he replied, energized by the prospect of his usefulness. “Anika wants to raise the profile of Tamarac College by modernizing it. Get faculty to bring their instruction up-to-date. We just have to have the willpower to try to do things differently!” He let out a short laugh and there it was: The power grab. The pretense of friendliness that shrouded a mandate. This was not a democratic undertaking of “we the people.” This was about his version of what should be. She pictured the two of them sitting there—his taut certitude, her fleshy accommodations—their duo a stale cliché that he would never notice.
“I guess I could learn a thing or two about multimodal practices,” she said, fending off the impulse to mutter “willpower my ass.” Instead, she added, “The best practices of multimodal teaching. Wow! What a mouthful.”
If Dr. Barnett caught the sarcasm, he didn’t show it. Instead, he paused and collected his thoughts before enlightening Ellie about what she was missing, uttering phrases like student passivity, consumers not producers, questioning the relevance of the essay, now that artificial intelligence (AI) did the work . . .
Ellie watched the posturing, the energetic mouth, self-important and unflattering in a person so young; she pictured him in 15 years, bloated, fed by pomposity and prerogative. Dr. Barnett was proud of projects that came out of his instruction, repeating “my students.” He said Ellie could share in his success and he promised to write the best report possible, one that would emphasize her capacity to grow and improve and retool her teaching strategies to meet departmental standards.
He spoke of the need for clear directions and fully articulated assignments that identified goals that could be met. So, Ellie thought. This isn’t about reigniting the students’ innate curiosity. This is about finding ways to pump them up. Fend off anxiety about being judged by creating paths for declarations of Good Job! Like students were dogs in constant need of coaxing and petting.
As she watched him shimmer with the good-willed impulse to duplicate his achievements, Ellie marveled at the way words could be used to bludgeon, even when they appeared to be doing something else. Barnett saw himself as a champion of change, apparently never questioning if the changes on offer were warranted or inevitable.
“. . . and it’s that combination that helps our young people get involved. Is that something that you think you can try?”
Huh? Ellie gripped the table and did her best to hide her nomadic mind by nodding, declaring, “Gotcha Bub!” with a finger snap and a wink.
Dr. Barnett blinked rapidly; his lips an open frown. Then, with a sturdy nod and passing smile, he announced a decision: He would visit her class in three weeks, during which time she would devise a lesson that incorporated the multimodal model. He would be watching to see how she interacted with those put in her care.
“I’m on your side,” he said. “Everyone wants you to do well.”
♦ ♦ ♦
According to Dr. Barnett’s textbook, Going Multimodal: A Practical Guide, students no longer read. They get fidgety when asked to pay attention for more than five minutes. College profs needed to stay current. After skimming a few chapters, Ellie got the gist. The multimodal approach endorsed a basic principle: stop yelling at students to get off their cell phones. Use the young’s interest in technology to “Meet students on their turf!” (That notion again.)
The magic potion for dissolving student torpor: Eliminate the old-fashioned essay and its love affair with thesis statements. Now that AI was available to compose the essay and fake “studenty” errors, English profs needed an arsenal of new tricks, which, per Dr. Barnett, took the form of “writing projects” that welcomed the use of multiple media. Cartoons, Blog posts, YouTube videos, Snapchat, Instagram. Ellie understood the inference: Composing with diverse texts reinforces the idea that diversity is a good thing. Social ideology meets everyday pedagogy, and you, newly minted PhD, make the kind of claim that gets you nods of approval and that nice tenure track job.
Ellie stretched, sipped coffee. Got it, she thought, jiggling her knee. Everyone likes what feels fresh. Currently, “the new” resided in the immediate and changeable amusements of the internet. Her interests— the ponderous contemplation of language philosophy—funereal.
And yet. How much should a professor break her back to devise amusements for the bored? Was she supposed to clamber and sweat and find ways to compete with TikTok, all the while lugging some vague hope of piquing their curiosity? And then there were the cheaters—those who adopted an “I did the thing” attitude as if that’s what counted. And did so even when they didn’t do the thing.
Ellie would never forget that email from one of the disaffected, a seemingly pleasant kid who met life with a light affect and easygoing outlook. Had an agreeable response to Ellie’s suggested improvements; always turned his work in on time. His final research paper addressed the topic of privacy and the internet, suggesting he’d been paying attention to class themes. Something about him had felt sly and there was that spindly smile, but, whatever. Then, two days before the final paper’s due date, the following appeared in her inbox:
Hey babe. I’m going to need the paper by 5. Make sure its 10 pages this time. And do the grammar check. Baines cares about that shit.
It took Ellie a minute to comprehend what she was seeing because her first thought was, “I don’t care about length or grammar. Don’t they listen?” But then the email’s actual meaning dawned on her. Her reply was quick: “Wrong recipient. Let’s talk.”
The student formally appealed his failing grade. Not exactly a surprise. Mr. Mild turned out to be a smooth operator, evidenced by an ingenious argument: The professor failed to turn the episode into a teachable moment.
Instead of dismissing the complaint, a five-member Grade Appeals Panel convened and called Ellie to testify. Eventually, she won. But two morons sided with the student. If the kid had put as much imagination into his work, he would have aced the class.
Ellie imagined the boy’s future: Hey kid. What did you learn in school?
That there is a system, and it can be gamed.
♦ ♦ ♦
The day before Dr. Barnett’s visit, Ellie tried to preempt blowback with a bribe: a box of donuts passed across desks while she explained what would be happening and begged for help. “Listen, guys,” she said, her voice raspy and confidential. “Can you at least pretend to be interested? My job’s on the line, ok?” The students grabbed and chomped but made no promises.
When she arrived to class the next day, Dr. Barnett was already seated in the back row, surrounded by four pretty coeds who cooed and laced silky hair around slender fingers, their complexions flushed and eager, their smiles secretive and certain. Ellie entered the room and walked to the front, plopped her bag on the desk, and waited for the class to come to attention.
Her stomach hit a curve ball as she surveyed the audience. Was it nerves or the Benadryl she’d taken to calm down? Ellie felt a disconnect between her mouth and her understanding of what she was doing, a reckless unhitching of her identity. For a moment, she stood outside of herself, watching her own eager-beaver expression collapse into a pile of sand. Acid rippled up her esophagus. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and managed to introduce, “Our honored guest, Dr. Timothy Barnett who will be observing today’s class.” The words aimed to take the edge off the formality his presence, but instead introduced awkward anticipation.
Ellie walked in silence to the whiteboard and wrote, “Are you a seeker?” Then turned to the class with a meaningful look plastered onto her face. Students shifted in their chairs, less inclined, apparently, to be on their phones in the presence of a male observer. He wore a patient smile.
“How would you answer that question?” Ellie said and waited, certain they would do that blank thing, as if the question had nothing to do with them. Which they did.
Ellie proceeded down the aisles and called out names.
Jake, are you a seeker?
“Yeah.”
Jessica?
“I guess so?”
Tyler?
“Naw.”
Alexie?
Quiet nod. (The kid looked terrified of life.)
Pamela.
“Yeah.”
Jonas.
“It’s already, like, been said.” His displeasure hung in the air.
Ellie made her way to the center of the room and spoke with cool detachment. “Did you notice the repetition in those responses? Is anyone interested in standing out? Being different? Memorable?”
Ellie rolled her shoulders. Now things should begin to happen.
“Ok. So. Today—Let’s try something different. Now, let’s suppose we were somewhere else. Remember our discussion the other day about context? When you speak, the time-of-day matters. The place matters. Today, here we are in this windowless classroom with its glaring white lights and beige walls. Dreary, right? How is this environment affecting our interactions?”
She nodded to herself, thinking, Yeah. Good. Got this. Getting into the spirit of the multi. We got color. We got objects. We got more than the printed word.
Ellie didn’t wait for responses. “So, here’s me thinking—what would happen to this class if we changed the scene? Who would we become? What if we met in the forest at midnight? And how about this? Throw in a doobie. What if we all took a puff or two, huh? Would we remove masks of deceit that censor our spirits?”
She paused again, hoping for companionable smiles. She sensed a stiffening hostility. Miscalculation. This was an audience of purists, the kind who signed abstinence pledges and volunteered for good causes. Ellie flipped her eyes to Dr. Barnett, who did that remote beauty thing. Anxiety flash. Sweat pooled at her neck. She forced herself to continue.
“Well, ok. The other day, I put on a favorite album—well, a CD, not an album. I know that you all don’t even use CDs anymore, but anyway, there was music. And my mood changed! Like, a big alteration, from morose to elated. So today, let’s consider music’s importance? In life. Music’s an ephemeral thing. Present. Absent. You know? Another thing: Music is not a printed text. And yet it is a printed text too. Well, what is music after all?”
Ellie was speaking too fast as the Benadryl loosened her limbs, melted spaces between thought.
“And, um, the music I was listening to was by someone who wanted to be different. Memorable. A one-of-a-kind artist who blazed to glory back in the 1970s. He shot to the head of the line because he was an original. Not a follower. And I thought, well, why not aim for that as a writer? Why not be your own person?”
Ellie swallowed a gulp of air. “So, the question is—how do we do that? Be different. Forgo the canned response. Well, let’s do an experiment.”
Ellie strode to the whiteboard, grabbed a marker, and wrote MODES in blue; underlined it.
“Here’s a word: Modes. A mode of perception is a way of perceiving something. Got it? Now, for most of us, vision gets top priority. We rely on it too much. It’s just one mode. We have others. We have five senses. Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.”
She added the prefix multi. “All five senses are modes of perception. Our bodies are multimodal. Right?”
Ellie kept speaking with her back to the class. “Today. . .,” she said, then wrote: “Mode of perception: Hearing.”
She turned around. “Today’s focus: Our ears. We’re going to concentrate on what we hear. Or rather, the relationship between what we hear and what we think and feel.”
Ellie smiled. “Now, what I’d like you to do—whoops! Almost forgot!”
She ran to the computer console and pushed the button that released an oversized screen, which projected Ellie’s already-typed directions for the planned classroom activity.
Writing + Modes of Perception
Lesson One: Hearing and Thinking
Listen. The lyrics will play on classroom speakers.
Take notes!
On a sheet of paper, answer the following questions:
- How would you characterize the music (beat, melody, tone)?
- Notice the lyrics. What grabs you?
- Translate. Restate the lyrics in your own words.
- Significance? Apply them to your life! Give a specific example!
Remember: Details matter.
- What message overall does the artist want to deliver? Why that message?
Ellie read each step out loud, wincing at the banality. But Dr. Barnett’s textbook advised professors to give explicit directions in assignments.
Ellie pressed another button. Soon, the troubled voice of Bruce Springsteen blared from the speakers. His leathery growl filled the room, describing a melancholy scraped and molded by a bleak landscape, the driving desire to be freed from malaise; a yearning to bust out of a mal paese (bad country) of spirit; a haunted search for transcendence.
Ellie watched the students look around, confused, shaking their heads.
Badlands: Ellie’s most treasured song. Its hard-core angst never failed to make inroads into her very being. She pictured crumbling rocks, amber grains, the stern welcome of Lady Liberty, promises offered, rarely delivered. Just as she was beginning to drift into a reverie of what constituted “the in-betweens,” she caught sight of Dr. Barnett holding up his hands in a stop gesture. Ellie hit the pause button.
“I don’t think they can hear,” he said, a crease of concern folded into his forehead. Everyone nodded, murmured enthusiastic affirmations. “Yeah” and “What’s the dude saying?” They spoke as if this was the first time their needs had been heeded. Which fueled more Dr. Barnett suggestions. “Did you happen to print copies?” he asked.
Ellie’s chin sagged. Wasn’t he the helpful one? Not getting her point: To listen without seeing. But who was she to argue with her mentor?
“Well, ok,” she said with forced cheeriness. “Why not? Let’s move on to step two.”
She walked back to her folders on the podium and overheard someone mutter, “Springsteen sucks.”
Ellie stopped on her heels and surveyed the room. “Who said that?” She waited. No one answered except Kaylee, whose eyes shouted, “What cha’ going to do about it?”
Ellie forced herself to unclench her jaw. “Let’s at least give the lyrics a hearing.” She grabbed a folder with xeroxes of printed lyrics and passed them around the room, then restarted the song, upping the volume. The room filled again with Bruce’s anguished crescendo of hope—to be saved by love yet tormented with doubts about whether he would be.
As Ellie listened, her chest crammed with rising emotion. She needed to move. Ellie began to walk between the desks, hitting a pen against the palm of her hand, a repeated thwack communicating “listen” “listen.” As she marched, she mouthed the lyrics and stared into the eyes of each student, silently emphasizing key words sung by her hero: notion, deep, sin, alive.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The pen hit her palm. The next lyrics were the most venerated. They ran right down her spine, arresting her with a power that never diminished, and even now she felt it. She stopped and let Bruce’s magic invade her skin, felt a release, a lift liberating her spirit—along with her tongue. Without thinking, Ellie sang out loud. And as Springsteen’s voice grew, hers did too, and soon she was belting the lyrics, meaning everything she said about finding honesty, a face that was real, moving past the brutality of life’s inequities. Her voice rose and echoed and shook the walls until the song ended. In the silence that followed, Ellie sank into the pleasure of relishing the mysterious, ineffable energy that would never be contained by regulations. Somehow, the rawness of Springsteen’s voice soothed life’s sore edges; he transported her to a place where failure was understood and forgiven.
Finally, she opened her eyes. Twenty-three faces stared at her with fascinated horror, including Dr. Barnett’s. Ellie cleared her throat, fumbled for something to say. Just as she started to speak, Kaylee pulled out her cell phone, tapped it, and a different set of lyrics filled the air, an upbeat, catchy confection that repeated the word “oh” and a refrain about “a good time.” Designed to stick in your brain once the music ended.
Ellie’s neck stiffened as she watched the room erupt in laughter. Jake said, “Now that’s more like it!” Students tapped their feet, heads bobbing. Kaylee stood up, strode over to Dr. Barnett and did a shimmy, and everyone laughed harder, including Mr. Handsome. Class ended. The students filed out without looking Ellie’s way.
♦ ♦ ♦
A march of shame down to Tamarac’s River Walk. Twenty minutes during which Ellie gnawed on thoughts about the way Barnett spoke after class ended, using gentle tones, like she was mentally challenged, in need of careful handling.
“Did you read my book?” he asked. “Were you confused? I mean, did you understand the term, multimodal?” The tilted head. The pale eyes of concern. Questions methodically asked: Why did you do X? What was Y supposed to achieve? How did X connect to Z? As if clear purposes and projected learning outcomes automatically led students to the land of Eureka! That’s not how it works, Ellie wanted to yell. Read your Frederick Douglas! Your bel hooks. Learning is painful and confusing and you’re assured nothing.
Dr. Barnett mentioned a second observation where they would “work to calibrate expectations in an appropriate way.”
Calibrate expectations. Who talks like that? Ellie punched the air. She wanted to say to Dr. Timothy Barnett, yes, sir, I read your book. And I found it to be a decontextualized and efficient pack of lies. A sneaky way to genuflect to the corporate mentality that now rules academic institutions. You’ve collected strategies for class management.
Ellie stomped down Thomas Avenue. She passed a young man in front of his house, holding a guitar, strumming and chanting, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Tuneless, melancholy.
At the river, Ellie passed marble statues and wooden benches and found the dirt path that was less traveled and harbored shadowed spaces in which to sit and sulk. She slid onto an empty bench, hiding among low-hanging branches as March’s cool air dampened cheeks still burning with humiliation. Dusk, that time of transformation when past and present meet and open a space in which to go over the day and do a gut check on where you stood.
Before, if you’d asked her, Hey Ellie, what do you do? She would’ve said, “I prepare today’s youth to honor language. To correlate its use with democracy itself.” She might’ve bopped your arm and said, “How ‘bout that?!” This response established her credentials and cancelled the cliché that reduced English studies to grammar instruction.
But now? Forget it. Too high-fa-lu-ting. And, it turned out that today’s student wanted lessons in grammar. They’d been marinating in a soup of superficial perfection courtesy of technology that photoshopped and autotuned and autocorrected. And let’s face it. Hadn’t the mindset of perfectionism worked its way into the classroom with all of that professional nonsense about how to achieve “the best.” Aspire to the middle middle middle of it all.
What about paradox? What about uncertainty? What about Montaigne?
Ellie whispered the name. Michel de Montaigne was a 16th-century virtuoso who revolutionized writing by composing the very first essay—a genre that knitted the anecdotal with the explanatory. All accomplished with the miracle of the looping inference. Montaigne wrote sentences that devised unpredictable associations. So surprising, they relaxed the mind’s habituated filters and prompted new chains of thought. All of that associational thinking might seem crazy or unproductive, but just when you were ready to despair over the digressions, the prose curved again and you realized that you were encountering an exhilarating unfolding as ideas tumbled over each other but were eventually shaped into a dazzling tapestry. It took time to read his work. If you rushed, you’d miss how Montaigne played with the connotations of the word “essay” itself, which, etymologically suggested a kind of wondering. Or wandering. “To essay”—a verb derived from the old French word essaier, which translated into “an attempt”; In Latin, exigere roughly meant “to investigate.” To essay. To not know. Just you, your imagination and the open horizon of wonderment.
Montaigne would have hated power points and the limitations of binary thinking mandated by the computer drop box that predetermined possible answers in advance of thought.
Ellie paused, listened to the low sweet toll of a church bell in the distance, her face forked, looking backward, looking forward, stalled in indecision. She watched pinpricks of light bounce along the river, dancing with the wind. The air hovered between calm and brisk, a March mix that winked at the coming spring.
She retrieved a sycamore leaf, large as her hand, brown and brittle. Crunched it into pieces. A tremor of grief seized her throat as she forced herself to admit the truth: You have nothing to do with Montaigne. And, let’s be clear. Montaigne would’ve loved multimodal. Montaigne would have transformed its associational energy into rhapsodies. Ellie, instead, was ruled by irrational fears. Like being secretly filmed by students aiming for YouTube fame. Or worse, not being filmed because she was too dull.
Behind her head, a twig snapped and Ellie jumped, hyper alert. She listened, heard a low sniggering as the pungent skunk-scent of reefer blossomed in her nostrils. Two young men emerged on the dirt path wearing parkas and blue jeans. One had a head of willowy hair dyed light green, the other a helmet of shiny black hair cut neatly around his ears. Both were young, possibly teenagers.
The black-haired boy laughed and said, “Hey, Dr. Baines.”
Ellie peered and drew her bag close to her chest.
“It’s Arthur. Arthur Yi. From English 305.”
Ellie searched his eyes, finally recognizing him from a course she’d taught two years earlier. A promising writer whose father came from South Korea. Had a sarcastic attitude about his family having landed in Tamarac of all places. She did not recognize his companion, who shifted from foot to foot and seemed like an unpleasant individual.
“Who’s that?” she said, clutching her bag, unsure of what this pair wanted.
“This is Jackson, a friend from the neighborhood.” Arthur slapped Jackson’s back.
“Dude!” Jackson barked. He held the joint in his right hand.
Arthur plopped on the bench and gestured for a hit, offered some to Ellie who shook her head and wound her arms tighter.
“Like, wow. Seeing you. Huh.” Arthur spoke easily. Ellie watched every movement, unsure of what was being offered.
“Like, just the other day, I thought of our class,” Arthur said. When she heard his voice, Ellie remembered him at his desk, wearing a sardonic smile even though he was always polite. Arthur asked questions, wrote well. Ellie remembered appreciating his wit.
At this moment, however, he babbled.
“You used to get my goat,” Arthur continued and the other boy exhaled a spluttery laugh. He took another hit. “Some of the things you said, I’d write them down. Like once you said,” and here Arthur mimicked Ellie’s gruff delivery, “What happened to the rolling sentence? The drift? Soundbites plant themselves. They don’t meander. —and I was like, what? And that time you said— Jesus, I’m bored! Let’s do something else. Take five minutes and describe the sound of thought.”
Arthur was laughing. “Just . . . nuts!” He released a mouthful of smoke. “But you know what? Yeah. Now I get it.”
“That’s some serious shit, man,” Jackson said. Ellie couldn’t tell who led, who followed. Arthur sat, sliding off the cliff of consciousness. Jackson grabbed the joint, kicked his foot into the dirt.
Arthur snapped back to attention. “The best? The duck thing. Remember?”
Ellie remembered. One day at the river walk during a lunch break, she came upon a gathering of ducks, at least 50, floating on the river’s surface. They formed a circle and faced each other. Some stood on the riverbank, their webbed feet gripping wet rock. For a moment, there was quiet. All stood at attention. Then one duck, the apparent leader, fluffed his wings, bobbed his head, and pumped his chest. He stretched his body up and down, slowly, rhythmically. The other ducks watched, then one by one, mimicked his movements; soon the whole group of them, the entire circle, was fluffing wings, bobbing heads and stretching. All in unison. It was terrifying and magnificent. Ellie was so excited she ran back to campus and described the scene in her next class. She had thought they weren’t listening.
“I loved that story,” Arthur said.
And out of nowhere, tears pricked Ellie’s eyes.
When it became clear that Arthur wasn’t going anywhere, Jackson hit the bench with a heavy thud. Ellie did not like his twitchy energy, but as Arthur testified to the greatness of English 305, she wondered if she might be in the habit of misreading a thing or two. Maybe she’d committed the very crime she warned pupils to avoid: Letting the past determine perceptions of the future. Maybe students at Tamarac College weren’t listless and disaffected. Maybe they shut down because they were panicking and ducking for cover, just like their parents. Just like all of us, trying to feel our way around a sharp and cutting world.
When the joint was passed, Ellie took a drag. Then another. And a couple more.
Eve Marie Gayley is new to fiction writing. She pays her bills by working multiple part-time jobs, including as an adjunct and in retail. She is currently completing her first collection of short stories, Sneaking Out the Front Door.
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