Good Day

Teaching my two classes of rhetoric this semester has been an exercise in discomfort, mind-numbing oration, and the destruction of countless hours of valuable time (spent not writing, but course planning, paper-grading and other pointless tasks of the academia grindhouse). After an agonizing re-appraisal - and a particularly helpful fireside chat with a fellow writer who ran through the same gauntlet last year - I decided to lay down the actual factuals for my students today.

I told them: You don't want to be here; I don't want to be here. This class sucks. Big public universities are little more than breeding grounds for the (expletive) boring, middle-class, track-housing-dwelling automatons you're all destined to become. Up until now, I have been operating as more or less of an agent of the (expletive) conformation and heart-removal process set up to destroy you, which is just an extension of high school and all the other institutional forms of control that you've been passed through - like some kind of raw material - since you were born. You're excited to have made it to the University of Iowa? Don't be. This (expletive) school - like most schools - doesn't really want you to be empowered and excited about change. It wants you to clam up, color between the lines, spit back rehearsed answers, and endure the prolonged insult to the soul that is institutionalized education. The teacher-as-authority-figure's job is to enforce this process. As a result, most of you are pretty boring. You're bored and you're boring, and I'm bored with all of us, including myself.

It was a good day.