GLYNN WASHINGTON, HOST:
Now today on SNAP JUDGMENT if you don't at first succeed, try, try again. Sara Barron signed up to teach a writing class knowing that what her students need more than anything else is a firm hand. Listener discretion is advised for sensitive listeners and for those with small children.
SARA BARRON: I was really excited about teaching. I thought - like, I watched all these movies about teaching like "Dead Poets Society" and "Stand And Deliver" and the one with Michelle Pfeiffer who's name escapes me now but there's some rapping song about it.
But I watched those movies and I was like, OK, all I have to do is I walk through the students' desks in a certain kind of way and I lean against my own desk in the right way and then I'll just look like I'm in control - and if you look like you're in control then in fact you are in control.
I got to this point where I really felt legitimately excited about the whole thing, but then the problem was - and this is classic behavior on my part - I undermined myself when, at the first class I was like, oh I know what I'll do - to look authoritative I'm going to call myself professor.
I was like, hey everybody I'm Sara, I'll be your writing professor. It came into me in what I thought was like, a moment of genius but in fact there was this one student whose name was Harry - and I don't mean to suggest that you can know a person as gay by looking at them, I don't think that you do, but I'm just saying there's a thing that he was doing with like, color clashing that was very strong and I was like, that's something that a gay man can do. Anyway so Harry was like, excuse me - did you just call yourself professor? And I was like, I did and he goes, right, is this an accredited college or university? And I was like, no and he's like, right it's not so you shouldn't call yourself professor, this is like adult continuing ed so you should call yourself instructor and I was kind of like, I'm going to cry/fair point.
And that was as chummy as it got those first few weeks, like, it was very awkward. We had to find some way to fill the time and I felt the least I could do for my students who were getting cheated out of a class that they'd pay for, was that I could at least leave it up to them in terms of what it was that we would do to fill the time. This is how it came to pass in a very necessity is mother of invention type way that we came up with a game that we called This Might Be Controversial. It came about in the workshop portion of the class and I had this one student who was Swedish and lovely and spoke impeccable English and his name was Sven and Sven felt really uncomfortable saying anything negative so he would say like, I really like how on page four, paragraph nine, it is wonderful when you do the scene where you're washing your feet and then crying. It's super-duper funny, but as my improvement - oh, I don't know Instructor, I just think writing is so hard for people so it's a good piece that Miriam has written.
Now mind you, Miriam was this recent retiree who I had and as her piece what she submitted was the eulogy from her mother's funeral. She was like one of - do you know there are those women, you always see them around and they wear like, only the color purple and you're like, oh right, you're a little broken? She was one of those people and I think that Sven intuited that about her and so therefore tried to be kind, but the problem was he would be kind to everybody, no matter what. And so I had to work very hard to get a harsher critique out of him. I'd say, listen, you have to find a way that works for you and the way that Sven found that worked for him was by saying, this might be controversial. He offered it up as sort of like this disclaimer. So he'd say something like, this might be controversial but on page six, paragraph 10 I thought the line where you had seven adjectives; this is very silly.
It was kind of like, for him, this might be controversial freed him up and allowed him to say whatever he had to say, which was its own thing, but then what started happening is it got to this point where no one in the class would give a critique without setting it up with this might be controversial. So you'd hear like, this might be controversial but on page one, paragraph three you're interpretation of manic depression as creative genius, like, for me it's like it feels really self-delighted.
So this is how it went, right, always hearing this phrase and then one day, maybe halfway through the class, Harry - who, to remind you was the guy who was gay and paired colors very well - he came back from a bathroom break and was like, all right listen, here's my idea - the next time someone says this might be controversial, the deal is you have to follow it up with something really controversial. What do you think?
And frankly I was like, whatever. Like anything that we can do to stretch this class out, let's bring it in. Harry, you go first. He said, great. This might be controversial but I actually do not want them to legalize gay marriage. I hate marriage, I hate the weddings, I hate the registries, I hate the amount of money, the travel. It's like suddenly all my vacation time is spent like going to other people's stupid weddings and I feel like the privilege of being gay was that I had to deal with less of that than everybody else. And he sighed when he was done and I was like excuse me Harry - that sounded good. He was like, excuse me, but it felt good.
And you could feel from the other students in the room not judgment, OK, it wasn't that anybody had been offended it was rather this sort of like, desire creeping out, this sense that the other students wanted their own catharsis.
This might be controversial but I wish divorce on most of my friends.
This might be controversial but I hated "The Wire."
And then I had this other student who was like, all right listen to this - this might be controversial but I saw this thing on the news the other day about this family OK? And I know it's horrible. They had 10 kids and one of the kids drowned in a river - horrible - but the parents are there and they're going on and they're on and they're sobbing and they're yammering and it's all about like how it's the city's fault and the city didn't have a fence up and all this kind of stuff.
And I was like, you guys - you still have nine more kids.
And no one said that it made sense, but the point is we tried to provide a safe environment for something like that to be articulated and this is how it would go, right? And the only rule in place was that you could not say something if you didn't believe it. Which to be frank was not a problem. I had this other student named Dave. Now, a few words on Dave - Dave was Caucasian, he had dreadlocks, he had very wealthy parents and what I thought of as sort of being an allergy to any and all critiques of his writing. And one day we're in the midst of playing our game and he goes all right, well, this might be controversial but I don't think bestiality is that gross, like, I'm just sayin' man, like I kinda get it.
And at that point, all of us nodded in acceptance - not agreement - but acceptance.
So there's this one day where Sven comes to class and he's looking atypically upset and Miriam's like, oh Sven, what's wrong? And Sven's like, well, I have something very controversial to say and I'm very ashamed by this one. Oh, this might be controversial but when I think about the politician that is John Edwards, I do not blame him for his cheating because his wife is so homely. And Miriam heard this and she was like, what? Sven, not is - was - Elizabeth Edwards has died. And then Dave was like, Miriam chill - Sven's just being controversial don't make him feel bad; he knows it's bad, just like, look how sad he looks. And Miriam was like, Sven I'm sorry, I don't mean to be cruel I mean we all have our things, you know, for what it's worth this might be controversial but, I only go to male doctors because I have a problem trusting women. This writing class in total ran for 10 weeks. When finally we reached that last week, something very bizarre and unprecedented happened which is that we wound up not playing This Might Be Controversial. It was almost as though we'd reached a sort of saturation point and we lost the will to speak on controversial subjects. But what was even weirder than that was that we didn't need to speak on controversial subjects because for the first and only time since the class had started, my students cared about my lecture because the topic was the business of writing and when I announced it to them and I was like, all right everyone it's time for us to talk about how to make money, suddenly it's like they're scribbling in their notebooks everybody has questions. They're like, am I going to get published? How often? How much money am I going to make? And it was the only moment as a teacher that felt to me like the teachers in the movies that I'd seen. Do you know what I mean? There was like some sense of, everybody calm down, hold on - I'm going to get there when I get there.
I said, you guys, listen up - you might get published but only online and you will never make any money. And they're like, any money? And I was like, well, no you could make some money but not the kind that's going to do you any good. And then I have this one student raise her hand and she was like, wait a second - is this why you pack a homemade tuna sandwich every week? And I was like, exactly. She was like, is this why your clothes are always stained because it's too expensive to dry clean them? I was like, exactly.
They'd done so much growing in the weeks that I'd had them. Maybe their writing hadn't gotten much better but certainly they were learning to read people and judge character. And I said, wow you guys, you have learned so much. And the second the words were out of my mouth, I catch them eying one another and Harry shook his head and raised his hand and said, I'm not so sure about that. I think that opinion might be controversial.
WASHINGTON: Big thanks to Sara Barron. This story came from the RISK podcast and thanks as well to Kevin Allison and all the folks at RISK. If you want to hear this piece uncut, raw and uncensored, head on over to the RISK podcast, we'll have a link on our website, snapjudgment.org.
When SNAP returns, one little girl puts her daddy to the test. How does he do?
When SNAP JUDGMENT, "The B-Team" continues. Stay tuned. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.