Shenny: Getting Intimate With Your Students

Feb 8

My Fellow Shennyer:

Seems to me that when you let parents make decisions about their children’s education, they’re going to push the values and beliefs they already have. Which is less education than indoctrination, and every student deserves to know more than their parents do.

But what do I know, I’m not a parent. Just another queer, reading week after week about the drive nationwide to keep our stories from being read and shared. Laws that want to deny queer and trans kids their existence. These are laws couched in the notion of ‘parent choice’ but are really just laws of authoritarian terror. What’s to be done about it? I’m fast losing hope in this nation providing a future for anyone other than the wealthy.

In that dark cloud comes Writers of Discontent: Constituting Censorship, an online reading to benefit the American Library Association's Unite Against Book Bans, hosted by USF’s English Department. They’ve invited me to read, and it’s an honor given what’s at stake. I’ll be reading from my memoir-in-progress, the kind of book that would likely get removed from high school libraries, even though it’s the very book I needed as a closeted kid in high school.

You can show your support, and donate to the cause, by joining us on Zoom on Wednesday 15 Feb at 5pm PST.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Writing Warmups
Like scales for the musician or when actors say ‘Unique New York’ backstage. What I do is type the alphabet, then do it again while not looking at the keyboard, then do it a third time, backward, not looking at the keyboard: zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba. That’s to ‘loosen the fingers’. Then I write a pangram: a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. It’s a great exercise for its stupidity and uselessness, just enough of a challenge to shake the morning cobwebs from your brain. Indulgent? Yes: it’s always good to indulge yourself first in a writing session, and maybe someday I’ll make use of such sentences as Jorge quietly broke several porcelain foxes Zoe’s mom owned. Or Drown the knightly pious queerboys lazing for more craven waxjobs. Or Frightened yucky jizz monsters wax plaques every Mo-vember. Or A few caged koala remnants quieted my poor Jaxon over at the Boyz Zone.

2. Haruomi Hosono’s ‘スポーツマン’
Like every girly gay boy, I grew up hearing a lot of messages about my body being wrong, stupid at its functions. In time, I learned to hate my body, and then in puberty I hated what that body desired. Tale as old as time. What I haven’t seen much art about is the effects body shame has on an overachiever, which basically every gay kid becomes to compensate for the lack of love and acceptance they feel from the hetero world that made them. The lie you tell yourself: If I can only act how they tell me to, I’ll no longer feel this way. Enter Haruomi Hosono’s ‘スポーツマン’ (‘Sports Man’), a song about a guy wishing he could win the attentions of an athlete. The assurance he keeps making to be what his beloved wants is familiar and heartbreaking: ‘People tell me I’m not strong. I can’t seem to find the right charge. I’ll be a good sport, be a good sport, I’ll be your sportsman.’ This sad story is mixed with the kind of twitchy synthpop that sounds like the music playing in my mind all the time, and I always love when tragedy gets delivered in a zany idiom.

Getting Intimate With Your Students

The one time I ever played Rock Band, I was drunk in the living room of a student rental in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, singing ‘Say It Ain’t So’ at the top of my lungs. Backing me up were two undergraduates I’d met that night, and their roommate, Clifton, a student from a class I taught two years previous. He and I’d had some beers at Buffalo Wild Wings earlier in the evening, talking mostly about what he wanted to do after graduation (weeks away), and about my pending departure to another job at another school.

When he’d emailed suggesting we get a drink before we each leave town, I thought Is that okay? For years I’d been meeting my graduate students for drinks, given that I’d just finished being a graduate student myself, and going out to drinks with graduate students formed 90% of how I knew how to hang out. Clifton had been the class clown, and I relate to folks who joke to get attention. He was easy to talk to, and when he invited me back to his place for an additional beer, I accepted.

Thinking about that night, scouring my motivations, was I another insecure professor desperate to be liked by his students? (Likely, yes.) Or was I a professor eager to tear down the boundary between student and teacher?

The boundary is real, and I picked it up from grad school professors. One told us a story from back when he was meeting with his dissertation director, feeling lost and overwhelmed, convinced he’d never finish the diss, then his director reached over and laid a hand on his shoulder, giving it a small squeeze. ‘It meant so much to me,’ my professor said. ‘But now I’d never touch a grad student.’

Another professor told me he made sure never to close the door to his office when meeting with a female students, and this is a rule I myself have adopted regardless of gender. If a student asks to close the door they can, but I can’t. (In my building at Alabama, all the office doors closed automatically behind you).

Necessary measures? Or reactionary overkill amid increased awareness of sexual harassment and assault on college campuses? I’m wary to create nostalgia for a time in academia when platonic touching, drinking outside (or inside) class, and so on were ‘okay’, because it too quickly smells like nostalgia for a time when academia comprised mostly hetero men teaching other hetero men.

But also, my favorite teachers crossed boundaries I don’t know I’d feel comfortable crossing.

In my last semester of undergrad, I finally enrolled in the Writing In The Major course I needed to graduate. (I’d avoided it because even folks who like writing hate writing papers.) The course was Russian Film History, taught by a Dr. Padunov, a man with a long gray ponytail and dark eyes that seemed to bore through you with a laser of hate. From day one he was strict and uncaring, a braggart about his tough grading standards. I went home furious this man stood between me and my BA.

Things changed in week two, and then kept changing. He softened in class, was witty in unpacking the many forms of Soviet montage. He was still harsh; when I used the word ‘penultimate’ in a paper to mean what I thought it meant—like, the most ultimate—he underlined it in red ink and wrote ‘What makes it second-to-last?’

I was so confused I had to look the word up and then realized what I’d done.

When I started teaching, I recognized the move: be harsh and evil early on to scare off all the lesser-committed students before add/drop. Lucky for me I couldn’t leave (I for sure would have). Later in the term, I emailed Padunov about a comment I kept getting on my papers, that my blockquoting from sources was ‘awkward’ or ‘clunky’. He emailed back on a Sunday, inviting me over to his house in Highland Park to look over some examples together.

I had nothing else to do that day, but more so I felt honored, thrilled to get some one-on-one access to a person who’d already taught me so much about how to make my writing mean something. I drove over. The house was spacious and cozy, threadbare pillows on the long sofa, a huge black wooden dining table that didn’t even fill the dining room. Padunov had me sit there and brought me a cup of the strongest coffee I’d ever drunk.

It was delicious. ‘You’re into art, right?’ he asked me. ‘I’ve seen your reviews in the paper.’ I was at this time freelancing as the art critic for one of Pittsburgh’s alt-weeklies, and I was embarrassed he’d seen them; had I known he was reading I would have made some different choices. But also flattered. Regadless, Padunov wasn’t there to critique, suggesting that we look, for guidance, at how critic Meyer Schapiro cited his sources. He grabbed a book from one of the shelves lining every room.

I’d never heard of Meyer Schapiro, but I sat with Padunov, side by side at that table, looking down at the book together and then up at each other whenever he had a point to make. I’ll never forget the softness in his voice, trying to be clear. I was inches away from those dark eyes, could smell the coffee on his breath. If I’d known I was gay at the time, I likely would have made a pass.

And of course he never did. His aim that day was to see me, and hear me, and take the time needed to help me learn. An hour later I left with a rare feeling: a person I admired had just taken me more seriously than I took myself.

Intimacy is an affect I’m not great at. (Ditto its cousin vulnerability.) The word reminds me of ‘intimates’—like: teddies and garters and all that—and thus cleaves more to the sensual than it ought to. But, like most humans, I also crave it. Not because it’s dangerous, or boundary-crossing, but because I don’t want to live a life without it.

Both these stories I’ve told—as the teacher, as the student—sound like the start of a court case. The invitation to the house. Let’s continue this in a more intimate location etc. etc. But it’s a hell of a thing to be invited to a person’s home, and take what hospitality they have to offer. I’d never invite a student to mine.

What’s that about? For 4 years now the bulk of my interactions with students has been as an administrator, program director, and my default is to keep a distance—partly for my own mental health, but also because intimacies don’t aid in that relationship.

But also: are students looking to cross that boundary, the way Clifton did? (He first suggested the meet-up, he invited me to his home.) Likely the best way to end this Main Matter is in memoriam. Looking up Padunov’s home address in Pittsburgh, to figure out which neighborhood he lived in (lost to memory), I found this notice of his memorial service.

Vladimir Padunov died last fall of cancer. I knew him for all of 4 months, and hadn’t spoken with him in 23 years, and yet this news makes me sadder than I expect. I feel I still owe him so much, but I know—as a teacher myself—that I owe him nothing.

This is my favorite photo of him, from a profile in the student newspaper I used to help edit: