Discussing the articles amongst the whole class was going badly. I've only had a few classes so far this quarter, but the trend is already pretty clear. My 12:30 class is full of smart but quiet students who've done all the reading but won't talk about it, and my 3:30 class is full of loudmouths who haven't read the assignments but are nonetheless willing to denounce them at great length. For purely practical reasons I prefer the latter dynamic.
But this was the 12:30 class, and they were busy mastering the art of the awkward silence. I'd ask leading questions and meet nothing but short, definitive answers that no one was willing to disagree with. The subject would lie there for a few seconds while I thought of some other way to stimulate interest, but I was fly fishing in a bathtub and everyone knew it. So I went to my standard backup plan. "Hey everyone, let's move our desks into four separate groups." By dividing the class into smaller groups of 5 or 6, I could get them talking to each other (instead of the same two extroverts and myself generating 97% of the dialogue), and then I could go from group to group and see what they all had to say.
So I went over to one of the groups to ask what they thought of the previous night's article (a piece on the changing structure of the American workplace within the last decade). Did they understand it? Did they agree with its premise? Does it resemble their own experiences with the world?
One girl, with blonde pigtails and braces, looked a little embarrassed. She had a slightly more specific issue.
"Um," she said. "What's this word here? None of us knew what it meant." She pointed to a line on a page, far too small for me to read from ten feet away. She read aloud: "Fa-loncks?"
"Could you put that in context for me? Read the sentence?"
"...this new group entered the labor force like a phalanx..."
Oh yeah, baby.
For about half a second I considered just saying that phalanx meant "a powerful force" or "a wedge".
Fuck that.
A phalanx isn't a wedge. It's ten thousand highly trained Greek soldiers charging downhill in a V formation with 20' long spears, about to reduce you and your 4th century B.C. farmhand militia into several dozen tons of meat and splintered bone.
Clearly, this young lady had a serious hole in her education.
And it was time to plug that hole.
Ordinarily I wouldn't waste several minutes on a simple word definition, but I justified it by telling myself that writers should know the weight of the metaphors they use. (I haven't yet lectured them on the importance of being able to justify anything, one of the most valuable skills I picked up in college. But I'll get to it.)
I told them about how the soldiers would stand, with spears and shields interlocked to produce the formation, how they were protected from incoming arrows while their spears would impale the enemy before they were close enough to respond with swords. How the real value was in breaking the enemy's formation, so they could then be taken apart piecemeal with minimal risk to the Macedonian troops. I told them how it allowed Alexander the Greek to conquer the entirety of the known world, and hinted at the echoing effect this would have throughout the next 2,000 years due to the associated spread of Greek culture across the region. I stopped before telling them Alexander's own homeland was being ransacked while he was off adventuring, and sadly couldn't work in anything about Alexander's notorious appetite for young men. Hopefully, their other teachers will take up some of the slack.
Needless to say, I don't get to use my classical education very often. My two years of studying Ancient Greek verb structure and participles is all but gone from my head. My knowledge of Greek theatrical practices and historiographical issues surrounding the records of the Roman Empire have, in fact, served me very poorly in my career as a research analyst for the tech industry. I have this reservoir of very specialized, wholly useless trivia stuck in my head, and even this brief Discovery-channel introduction to Alexander the Great felt like the dam bursting. For once, I was filling someone else's head with this crap. And I was getting paid for it!
I realized I'd been raving for just a little too long and looked back at my students, who were a little awestruck by this answer to a fairly simple question.
The girl who originally asked the question though, smiled and said, "Cool!"
So, as of my first week at this job, I officially like being a teacher.