Our Place as Instructors

I keep circling Lynn Bloom's "Teaching College English as a Woman." It was, indeed, a horrific piece. Not only for its description of brutal sexual violence, but also for its uncompromising portrayal of sexism in the sphere of higher education. It is as if Bloom, and by extension all women (and, by further extension, all those who fall into the "feminized" construction of entry-level composition studies) are constantly being reminded, either explicitly or implicitly, to "know thy place."

Given this constant, othering message of a false hierarchy, we might look at the final episode of Bloom's essay in terms of questioning one's "place" or "role" in the classroom. In fact, the straightforward (and, as a result, somewhat ambiguous) nature of this chilling episode begs the reader to take it and make something out of it. We are never truly asked by Bloom to examine her story any specific way, and thus are left to read our own reasoning into it. What I keep returning to is, "What would those practitioners of academic misogyny make of Bloom's decision to relay such a personal and devastating story to her students?"

I assume that their response would be much the same as what they've been parroting all along: "Know your place." That is to say, know your place as a teacher, not as a moralizer, or as an activist, or, frankly, as a human being.

But who decides what it means to take one's place as an instructor? In my opinion, it can only be the instructor herself. The story Bloom tells her class may not fit into the antiseptic New Critical approach to literature that may have been expected of her in many phases of her career, but, as we find out in the end, it was without a doubt necessary for her to relay. Our discussions of literature, rhetoric, or what have you, can have direct impacts on our actual lives. The point here is that to think that the academy harbors this thing called "education," and that it has exists only within the pages of books and the minds of theorists, is a folly, at best. It is up to the self-actualized educator to know when to point out that what we read in books transcends the boundaries of the intellect and finds itself rendered -- sometimes horrifically so -- in our everyday lives.