Major Anxiety

September is almost here, and I am frantically trying to prepare for fall semester. I was fretting about this with some friends recently. We were bemoaning the impending lack of freedom, the soon-to-be crowded campus, but most of all the return of the undergraduates.

The return of students means the return of complaints about grades (I can't -*sob*- believe - *sniffle* - that you gave me - *gasp* - a B+).

The return of students means the return of a seemingly endless barrage of emails asking questions such as:*

"When is the test?" (That date on the syllabus might just be an estimate, after all)

"Where is Davis Hall?" (Map? What is this "map" of which you speak?)

"Is there a higher power in the universe?" (and will this be on the final?)

In the midst of all this half-serious bitching, one woman said something that stopped the laughter faster than a pedophile joke:

"I bet we are going to get Freshmen who want to major in Symbology."

I know I've blogged about this before, but is there any limit to Dan Brown's evil power?

One of the things my students find hardest to grasp is a comfort with, or even a delight in complexity, uncertainty, openendedness. They are very concerned about being right. It is this concern that leads them to write very boring essays, which are little more than summaries and that pointedly ignore any rough edges (where, of course, all the real interest lies).

It also attracts them to theoretical explanations that are tidy and totalizing, that explain away all uncertainty, plurality, tension (where, of course, the real interest lies. The facile assumption of The Da Vinci Code is that if the alternate account of history were true, it would "solve for" all those works of art, instead of merely acting as a new starting point. My students' excuse is that they are very young. What is Dan Brown's excuse?).

They want decoder rings. They want to find Professor Causabon's Key to all Mythologies, apply it to a text and have done.

Oddly enough, many of my best and most creative students are from the hard sciences. I think this is because they are very comfortable with the idea of making mistakes. Mistakes are built into the scientific method, and scientists understand that making them is an essential part of the process of discovery.

There are better things than being right. Learning, for one, is better than being right.

*Actual questions from students.