Broadkill Review
"My Huge Basketball IQ" by Jason Koo
Updated: May 2, 2020
Finally finished “The Origin of the Work of Art,”
which is not an essay but a confrontation:
you have to be engaged with it at all times to see
what is being said, to see even a part of it,
only sixty pages long but taking me two weeks
to read. Yesterday on the first day of class,
after thinking so long over break about some
nasty student evals I received, how to get better
as a teacher, how to get more out of my students,
specifically how to make them feel more
comfortable while still pushing them,
as the #1 complaint is always that I am not
“sensitive to students’ needs,” I was confronted
by students already looking away when I
made eye contact or just staring into space
as I spoke, still staring into space when I returned
my gaze to them half a minute later, and
I could feel my frustration creeping in again,
all the hopeful theorizing I’d been doing
about how best to help these students being
met, on the first day, with anxiety, insecurity,
boredom, indifference, though my energy level
and enthusiasm were higher than usual,
and “enthusiasm for the material” is always
my highest mark on evals, begrudgingly
marked 4 out of 5 by even the most hateful
students, and I joked how already I was
seeing people stare off into space, saying,
It’s only the first day of class, people!
using a little sarcasm, then I caught myself,
because I vowed to try to be less sarcastic
this semester, more direct and sincere,
and I made a point of saying something about
what class participation means to me: you
don’t have to talk all the time but you do
have to be engaged, which starts with looking
at someone when they’re speaking, beginning
with the teacher: it’s just rude, isn’t it,
not to look at someone when they’re talking
to you? We all know this outside of class
but for some reason in class we think it’s okay.
After that all the students started to look
at me when I spoke, one girl in particular
who was flustering me by staring into space
began speaking a lot, this worked so well
I think I’m going to make a point of putting
it down as an official policy on my syllabus.
On the current student evals my university
employs, the students are asked at the top
of the form to evaluate themselves first,
whether they tried their best to learn
the material, whether they took from the course
skills they can use, and they always rate
themselves highly, on average usually 4.5
or higher out of 5, never once have I seen
any students rate themselves lower
than a 3 (neutral) out of 5, even though
some failed to turn in multiple assignments.
And, I don’t know, this seems to me to be
um, what, disappointing? This total lack
of accountability on the part of people
entrusted to hold me accountable?
They are prompted by the system to confirm
their accountability first, then given free rein
to attack me personally with no accountability
whatsoever. At least my name is by their grades.
And my job, ultimately, as a non-tenure-track
prof, is always on the line when I give out
bad grades that have been earned for poor work.
And I have long experience and expertise
in evaluating this particular work of writing
that they do, which is why I was hired.
But what experience or expertise do they have
in evaluating teaching, my body of work,
especially bad students? They naturally just
record what they thought of me as a person,
or compare me, perhaps, to some other teacher
or class in which they had a more favorable
experience. And of course by favorable
what we’re talking about here is a good grade,
without fail every class I’ve taught
in which I’ve given higher grades netted
marks on evals that on average were higher.
I don’t think I’m a better teacher in those classes
in which I’m rated higher, if anything I think
I’m worse, as the students seem to be performing
well without much need of help from me.
There is always an unraveling that happens
out of pure beginnings, as I have just read
about again in Mary Ruefle’s “On Beginnings,”
which I’ll be teaching to my Intro to Creative Writing
students, even this very sentence is an illustration,
as I had the pure beginning of the phrase
“There is always an unraveling that happens”
as I sat on the toilet just a few minutes ago
and then it took another hundred clauses
just to include the sidebar of the info about
rereading “On Beginnings” and teaching that.
We have an idea how to change things,
a new hope, as Star Wars might say, and then
we start to move through time and interact
with other people and pretty soon the Death Star
detonates that hope from a million miles
away. On the second day of Intro to Creative Writing
I come in prepared to talk about my engagement
policy then lead a fun abecedarian exercise
but before I can even talk about engagement
a new student who missed the first day of class,
looking like he’s just emerged from the sleep
that caused his absence, starts doodling as I speak,
even after I’ve just made a point of introducing
him and—when everyone sat there awkwardly
without greeting him—prompted the class to say hello.
Already the unraveling is happening and the class
hasn’t even begun, this dude comes in having missed
the first day, gives zero fucks about what he missed
and proceeds to ignore me by doodling.
Imagine showing up one day late for a new job
or an appointment or a date or your own wedding
and immediately starting to doodle when the person
you’re there to see speaks. The behavior is absurd,
but we’ve come to accept it, and I’ve had it.
I suddenly have the memory of balancing
my checkbook at the beginning of a teaching
practicum—oh the irony—I took my first year
in the PhD program at the University of Missouri,
I had contempt for the class as I’d already had
a practicum in my MFA program and had been
teaching for four years and the teacher leading
the class wasn’t giving us any practical tips
for teaching but just going over pedagogical theory,
which is so useless for your particular classes,
i.e. reality, so I’d decided to tune out in class
and mock it and the teacher any chance I got,
and on this day I really needed to balance
my checkbook for some reason, and the teacher,
probably raised to a boil of fury as she noticed me
doing this for several minutes, finally snapped
at me and told me to put my checkbook away
and I did, shamed. She was right to do that.
I was e