My Short Teaching Career.... A Gentleman Should Have Intestinal Fortitude

I preface this post with the statement that I think "Teach for America" is a great an necessary program that I do not know it well enough to make a informed judgment. That said, here is my horrible experience with TFA.

I was reminded of my one-lecture teaching career by this article discussing the microcosm of American Primacy in the beef between Jay-Z and The Game. The article sets Jay-Z (rap mogul, record company executive, all-around player) as the hegemonic US, and The Game as the backlash against said power. It presents two options:

So what does Jay-Z do? If he hits back hard in public, the Game will gain in publicity even if he loses... the classic problem of a great power confronted by a smaller annoying challenger. And given his demonstrated skills and talent, and his track record against G-Unit, the Game may well score some points. At the least, it would bring Jay-Z down to his level -- bogging him down in an asymmetric war negating the hegemon's primary advantages. If Jay-Z tries to use his structural power to kill Game's career (block him from releasing albums or booking tour dates or appearing at the Grammy Awards), it could be seen as a wimpy and pathetic operation -- especially since it would be exposed on Twitter and the hip hop blogs.

What does this have to do with my one and only lecture? Well, such a ridiculous over-analyzed argument, given at the wrong time, to the wrong audience, basically sums up my only lecture.

While I was doing my Shakespeare seminar, I had a friend teaching EngLit in public high schools in a rough corner of Columbus Ohio. Having exchanged papers and ideas throughout the many Philosophy Coffees (here comes the nerd) at our small liberal arts college, she asked me to give a lecture basically on my observations of "Private Thoughts and Madness in Shakespeare." I had my notes prepared, a tie on, and illustrating examples from the Ghostface Killah's masterpiece FishScale. I even had examples of iambic pentameter from the album. Do you know how many times I listened to "Kilo ft. Raekwon" to find an example that fit? Unfortunately, I couldn't get to these examples. The lecture went like this:

Me: Hello class, my name is Nate, and I want to talk a little about Shakespeare and some of the different tricks he used to create private characters on the public stage. Who can tell me the difference between a soliloquy and an aside?"

Unidentified kid: Shut the fuck up, fag.

I stumbled along for a few more minutes, but it was essentially over at that point. After the lecture, I went out to lunch with my friend and she said it takes a certain fortitude to work with those kids. "They were so mean," was all I could get out in reply.